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In the
following text there are two sorts of notes. The first are those provided by
Rousseau; their position is indicted in the text with a hyperlinked phrase in
brackets: e.g., (Note 1), which directs the reader to the appropriate note at
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Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote hisDiscourse
on Inequality(also called
theSecond Discourse) as
an entry in a competition organized by the Academy of Dijon in 1754. He had won
first prize in a previous competition (in 1750) with hisDiscourse on the Sciences and the
Arts(theFirst Discourse), a victory
which had helped to make him famous.The
Second Discoursedid not fare
so well in the contest. The Second Discourse was published in 1755.

When theSecond Discoursewas published again in 1782, Rousseau
inserted a few short additions into the text. These are included in the main
text here and are indicated by square brackets: e.g., [Text added in the 1782
edition].

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of
Inequality Among Men

by

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau

Citizen
of Geneva

We ought to think about what is natural
not in things which are corrupt but in things
which are well ordered by nature.(1)

Convinced that only the virtuous
citizen may give his homeland honours which it can acknowledge, I have been
working for thirty years to become worthy of offering you a public homage, and
since this happy occasion makes up in part for what my efforts have not been
able to accomplish, I believed that I would be permitted here to follow the
zeal which inspires me more than the right which ought to act as my
authorization. Having had the good fortune to be born among you, how could I
reflect on the equality which nature has established among men and on the
inequality which they have instituted, without thinking about the profound
wisdom with which both of these, happily combined in this state, contribute in
a manner most closely approaching natural law and most favorable to society for
maintaining public order and the happiness of individuals? As I was
investigating the best principles which good sense could set down concerning
the constitution of a government, I was so struck by seeing them all at work in
yours that, even if I had not been born within your walls, I do not think I
would have been able to forego offering this picture of human society to those
who, among all peoples, seem to me to possess its greatest advantages and to
have best averted its abuses.

If I had had to choose the place where
I was born, I would have selected a society whose size was limited by the extent
of human faculties, that is to say, by the possibility of being well governed,
and where each man was competent in his work, so that no one would be compelled
to delegate to others the functions to which he was assigned, a state where,
because all the individuals knew each other, neither the obscure maneuvers of
vice nor the modesty of virtue would be able to escape the view and judgment of
the public, and where this sweet habit of seeing and knowing each other made
the love of one’s homeland the love of the citizens rather than the love of the
land.

I would have wanted to be born in a
country where the sovereign and the people could have only one and the same
interest, so that all the movements of the machine would tend to nothing but
the common happiness. Since that would not be possible unless the people and
the sovereign were the same person, it follows that I would have wished to be
born under a democratic government, wisely tempered.

I would have wanted to live and die
free, that is to say, sufficiently subject to laws so that neither I nor anyone
else would be able to shake off their honorable yoke, that salutary and mild
yoke which the proudest heads carry all the more obediently because they are
created to carry no other.

Thus, I would have wished that no one
in the state could assert that he was above the law and that no one outside of
it would be able to impose any law that the state was obligated to recognize.
For no matter what the constitution of a government may be, if
there is a single man who is not subject to the law, all the others are
necessarily at his discretion (Note 1). And if there is a national leader and another
foreign leader, no matter how they may divide up authority, it is impossible
for both of them to be properly obeyed and for the state to be well governed.

I would not have wanted to live in a
newly established republic, however good the laws it might have, for fear that,
since the government might perhaps be set up in a way different from what would
be necessary at the time and so would not be suitable for the new citizens or
the citizens for the new government, the state might be subject to being
undermined and destroyed almost from the moment of its birth. For with liberty
it is like those solid and delicious foods or those rich wines that are
appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust temperaments accustomed to
them but that overwhelm, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate ones not
made for them. Once people have grown accustomed to masters, they are no longer
capable of doing without them. If they attempt to shake off the yoke, they
distance themselves even further from liberty, because they confuse it with an
unrestrained license, which is its opposite, and so their revolutions almost
always deliver them over to seducers, who merely make their chains worse. Even
the Roman people, that model of all free peoples, was in no a condition to
govern itself when it came out from under the oppression of the Tarquins.
Debased by the slavery and the ignominious work the Tarquins had imposed on it,
at first it was only a stupid population, which had to be managed and governed
with the greatest wisdom, so that, as it gradually grew accustomed to breathe
the healthy air of liberty, these souls, enervated or rather stupefied under
tyranny, by degrees acquired that strictness of morality and
courageous pride that finally made them the most respected of all peoples.(3)
Hence, I would have sought out for my homeland a happy and peaceful republic
whose antiquity was in a way lost in the night of time, that had gone through
only those troubles suitable for demonstrating and reinforcing among its
inhabitants a courage and a love of homeland and in which the citizens, long
accustomed to a wise independence, were not only free but worthy of being free.

I would have wanted to choose for
myself a homeland whose fortunate lack of power made it turn away from a
ferocious love of conquests, and which was protected by a location even more
fortunate from the fear of itself becoming the conquest of another state; a
free city situated among several peoples, none of whom had an interest in
invading it and each with an interest in preventing others from doing so
themselves, a republic, in short, which did not tempt the ambition of its
neighbours and which could reasonably count on their assistance in times of
need. In such a happy situation it follows that it would have had nothing to
fear except itself and that, if its citizens were trained in using weapons,
this would be to maintain among them that warrior spirit and that courageous
pride which are so well suited to liberty and which nourish the taste for it,
rather than from the need to provide their own defense.

I would have searched for a country
where the legislative right was common to all the citizens. For who can
understand better than they the conditions under which it is appropriate for
them to live together in the same society? But I would not have approved of
plebiscites like those among the Romans, where the leaders of the state and
those most interested in its preservation were excluded from the deliberations
on which its security frequently depended and where, by an absurd inconsistency,
the magistrates were deprived of rights that simple citizens enjoyed.

On the contrary, in order to stop
self-interested and badly conceived projects and the dangerous innovations that
finally ruined the Athenians, I would have desired that no one man had the
power to propose new laws according to his fancy; that this right belonged only
to the magistrates and that even they used it with such circumspection that the
people, for its part, would be reluctant to give its consent to these laws, and
that their promulgation could be carried out only with so much solemnity, that
before the constitution was undermined the citizens would have had the time to
realize that it was above all the great antiquity of the laws which made them
sacred and venerable, that the people soon grows contemptuous of laws that it
sees changing every day, and that, by growing used to neglecting ancient
customs under the pretext of doing better, people often introduce great evils
in order to correct lesser ones.

Above all, on the grounds that it must
be badly governed, I would have run away from a republic where the people
believed they could dispense with their magistrates or leave them with only a
precarious authority and so would have imprudently kept control of the
administration of civil matters and the execution of their own laws. Such must
have been the rudimentary constitution of the first governments which emerged
immediately from the state of nature, and such was also one of the vices that
ruined the republic of Athens.

But I would have chosen a country where
the individuals were content with giving their sanction to the laws, and,
deciding as a collective body and on the basis of a report from their leaders
the most important public issues, established respected tribunals,
distinguished with care their various departments, and elected year by year the
most capable and most honest of their fellow citizens to administer justice and
govern the state. The virtue of the magistrates in this way would bear witness
to the wisdom of the people, so that they both mutually honored each other.
Thus, if ever some fatal misunderstandings happened to trouble public concord,
even these times of blindness and errors would be characterized by evidence of
moderation, reciprocal esteem, and a common respect for the laws, harbingers
and guarantees of a sincere and permanent reconciliation.

Such are, Magnificent, Most Honoured,
and Sovereign Lords, the advantages I would have looked for in the homeland I
would have chosen for myself. And if providence had added to these a charming
location, a temperate climate, a fertile countryside, and the most delightful
appearance under heaven, then to complete my happiness, I would have desired
only to enjoy all these benefits in the bosom of this happy homeland, living
peacefully in a sweet society with my fellow citizens, practicing towards them,
following their example, humanity, friendship, and all the virtues, and leaving
after me the honorable memory of a good man and an honest and virtuous patriot.

If, less happy or wise too late, I had
seen myself reduced to ending an unhealthy and languishing career in other
climates, vainly regretting the peace and quiet which my imprudent youth had
taken away from me, I would at least have nourished in my soul these same
feelings which I could not have put to use in my own country, and, filled with
a tender and disinterested affection for my distant fellow citizens, I would
have delivered to them from the depths of my heart something close to the
following address.

My dear fellow citizens, or rather my
brothers, since the ties of blood as well as the laws unite almost all of us,
it is sweet for me to be unable to think of you without at the same time
thinking of all the goods which you enjoy, whose value none of you perhaps
feels better than I, who have lost them. The more I reflect on your political
and civil situation, the less I can imagine that the nature of human affairs
could include a better one. In all other governments, when it is a question of
securing the greatest good for the state, everything is always limited to
abstract projects, at most to simple possibilities. For you, your happiness is
complete. All you have to do is enjoy it. To become perfectly happy, you have
no further need other than to know how to content yourselves with being so.
Your sovereignty, acquired or recovered by the point of a sword and preserved
for two centuries through merit and wisdom, is finally recognized fully and
universally. Honorable treaties determine your boundaries, assure your rights,
and strengthen your repose. Your constitution is excellent, set down by the
most sublime reason and protected by friendly and respected powers. Your state
is tranquil: you have neither wars nor conquerors to fear. You have no masters,
other than the wise laws you have made, administered by magistrates with
integrity, whom you have chosen. You are neither rich enough to become
enervated by softness, and with vain delights to lose the taste for genuine
happiness and solid virtues—nor so poor that you need more help from foreigners
than your industry procures for you. And this precious liberty, which in great
nations is maintained only with exorbitant taxation, costs you almost nothing
to preserve.

May a republic so wisely and so happily
constituted last eternally for the happiness of its citizens and as an example
to other peoples! This is the only wish that remains for you to make and the
only care left for you to take. From now on it is up to you alone, not to
create your happiness, for your ancestors have spared you that trouble, but to
make it durable by the wisdom of using it well. Your preservation depends upon
your perpetual union, your obedience to the laws, and your respect for their
ministers. If there remains among you the least germ of acrimony or mistrust,
hurry to destroy it as a deadly leaven that sooner or later would bring you
misfortune and the ruin of the state. I entreat you all to go back deep into
your hearts and to consult the secret voice of your conscience. Does anyone among
you know in the universe a body more honest, more enlightened, and more
respectable than your Magistrates? All of its members offer you examples of
moderation, simplicity of morals, respect for the laws, and the most sincere
reconciliation. So without any reservations, render to such wise leaders that
healthy confidence which reason owes to virtue. Consider the fact that they are
your choice, that they justify that choice, and that the honours due to those
whom you have dignified necessarily reflect back on you yourselves. None of you
is so little enlightened that he does not know that where the vigour of the
laws and the authority of their defenders cease, there can be neither security
nor liberty for anyone. Then what is of concern among you other than to carry
out with a good heart and a just confidence what you would always be obliged to
do by true interest, by duty, and for the sake of reason? Do not let a culpable
and fatal indifference to the maintenance of the constitution ever make you
neglect, in time of need, the wise counsels of the most enlightened and the
most zealous among you. But may equity, moderation, and the most respectful
firmness continue to regulate every step you take and to manifest in you to the
entire universe the example of a proud and modest people, as jealous of its
glory as of its liberty. Take care above all—and this will be my last piece of
advice—never to listen to sinister interpretations and poisonous speeches,
whose secret motives are often more dangerous than the actions they are
proposing. An entire house wakes up and responds with alarm to the first cries
of a good and faithful guardian who never barks except at the approach of
thieves, but we hate the importunity of those noisy animals whose barking never
ceases to disturb the public peace and whose constant and inappropriate
warnings are not listened to, even at a time when they are needed.

And you, Magnificent and Most Honoured
Lords, you worthy and respectable magistrates of a free people, allow me to
offer my homage and my respects to you in particular. If there is in the world
a rank suited to conferring renown upon those who hold it, it is undoubtedly
the one that talents and virtue confer, the one of which you have made
yourselves worthy, and to which your fellow citizens have raised you. Their own
merit adds to yours still a new luster, and, selected by men capable of
governing others so that they are governed themselves, I find you as superior
to other magistrates as a free people, above all the one you have the honour of
leading, is superior to the population of other states, thanks to its
enlightenment and its reason.

Allow me to cite an example for which
better records should remain and which will always be present in my heart. I
cannot recall without the sweetest emotion the memory of that virtuous citizen
to whom I owe my life and who in my childhood often spoke of the respect that
was due to you. I see him still, living from the work of his hands and feeding
his soul with the most sublime truths. In front of him I see Tacitus, Plutarch,
and Grotius, mixed in with the instruments of his trade. I see
at his side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the gentle
instruction of the best of fathers.(4)
But if the strayings of a foolish youth made me forget for a while such wise
lessons, I have the happiness of feeling at last that, no matter what tendency
one has towards vice, it is difficult for an education in which the heart is
involved to remain lost forever.

Such are, Magnificent and Most
Honorable Lords, the citizens and even the ordinary inhabitants born in the
state you govern. Such are those educated and sensible men, about whom, under
the name of workers and the people, those in other nations have such low and
false ideas. My father, I affirm with joy, was not distinguished among his
fellow citizens. He was only what they all are, and given the kind of man he
was, there is no country where his society would not have been sought out and
cultivated, and even to their advantage, among the most respectable people. It
is not appropriate for me and, thank heaven, it is not necessary to speak to
you about the esteem which can be expected from you for men of that quality,
your equals in education as well as by the rights of nature and of birth, your
inferiors by their own will, by the preference which they owe and have accorded
to your merit, something for which you in turn owe them some sort of
acknowledgement. I learn with a lively satisfaction how much your gentleness
and condescension temper for them the solemnity which befits ministers of the
laws, how much you repay them with your regard and attention for what they owe
you in obedience and respect, behaviour full of justice and wisdom, appropriate
for distancing more and more the memory of the unfortunate events which it is
necessary to forget in order that they are never seen again; conduct all the
more judicious since this equitable and generous people makes a pleasure of its
duty, and naturally loves to honour you, and since those keenest
to maintain their rights are the ones most inclined to respect yours.(5)

It should not be surprising that the
leaders of a civil society love its glory and its happiness. But it is too
surprising for the peace of men’s minds to expect that those who think of
themselves as magistrates, or rather as masters, of a holier and more sublime
homeland, manifest some love for the earthly homeland which nourishes them. How
sweet it is for me to be able to make such a rare exception in our favour and
to place among the ranks of our best citizens these zealous men, trustees of
sacred doctrines authorized by the laws, those venerable ministers of souls,
whose lively and sweet eloquence carries the Gospel maxims into the heart all
the better because they always begin by practicing them themselves! The whole
world knows with what success the great art of the pulpit is cultivated in
Geneva. But, too accustomed to perceiving things said one way and done another,
few people know how far the spirit of Christianity, the sanctity of morals, the
strictness towards themselves, and the gentleness toward others prevail among
our ministers. Perhaps it is up to the city of Geneva alone to demonstrate the
edifying example of such a perfect union between a society of theologians and
men of letters. I base my hope for the permanent tranquilly of the state in
large part on their wisdom, their acknowledged moderation, and their zeal for
its prosperity, and I observe with a pleasure mingled with astonishment and
respect how much they are horrified by the dreadful maxims of those holy and
barbarous men, of whom history provides more than one example, who, to maintain
the so-called rights of God, that is to say, their interests, were all the less
averse to shedding human blood because they flattered themselves that theirs
would always be respected.

Could I forget that precious half of
the republic that creates the happiness of the other half, and whose sweetness
and wisdom maintain peace and good morals within it? Amiable and virtuous
female citizens, the lot of your sex will always be to govern ours. What
happiness when your chaste power, exercised solely within the conjugal union,
makes itself felt only for the glory of the state and public well being! That
is how women used to command in Sparta, and that is how you deserve to command
in Geneva. What barbarous man could resist the voice of honour and of reason in
the mouth of a tender wife? Who would not scorn vain luxury at the sight of your
simple and modest dress which, through the brilliance it acquires from you,
seems to be most favorable to beauty? It is up to you always to maintain by
your amiable and innocent sway and your captivating spirit the love of the laws
in the state and harmony among the citizens, to reunite divided families with
happy marriages, and, above all, to correct by the persuasive sweetness of your
lessons and by the modest graces of your conversation the errant ways that our
young people happen to pick up in other countries; from where, instead of so
many useful things from which they could profit, they bring back, with a
puerile tone and ridiculous airs acquired among lost women, nothing but an
admiration for who knows what kind of would-be grandeur, frivolous compensations
for their servitude, which will never be worth august liberty. So always be
what you are, the chaste guardians of morals and the mild restraints of peace,
and continue to put to good use on every occasion the rights of the heart and
of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue.

I flatter myself that, in basing my
hope for the general happiness of the citizens and for the glory of the
republic on such guarantees, I will not be proved wrong by events. I confess
that with all these advantages it will not shine with that brilliance which
dazzles most eyes and for which the childish and fatal taste is the most deadly
enemy of happiness and liberty. Let the dissolute young go elsewhere to seek
easy pleasures and long repentance. Let the so-called people of taste admire in
other places the grandeur of palaces, the beauty of carriages, the superb
furnishings, the pomp of spectacles, and all the refinements of soft living and
luxury. In Geneva, one will find only men, but a sight of this kind nevertheless
has a real value of its own, and those who seek it out are well worth the
admirers of the rest.

Magnificent, Most Honoured, and
Sovereign Lords, may you all deign to receive with the same kindness the
respectful testimonies of the interest that I take in your communal prosperity.
If in this lively outpouring of my heart I have been so unfortunate as to be
guilty of some indiscreet transport, I beg you to pardon that as the tender
affection of a true patriot and the ardent and legitimate zeal of a man who considers
that there is no greater happiness for him than that of seeing you all happy.

I am, with the most profound respect,

Magnificent, Most Honored and Sovereign
Lords,

Your very humble and very obedient
servant and fellow citizen

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Chambery, 12 June 1754.

PREFACE

The most useful and the
least advanced of all areas of human knowledge seems to me to be that of man (Note 2), and I
venture to say that the inscription on the temple at Delphi by itself contained a precept more important and more difficult than all the
bulky volumes of the moralists.(6)
Thus, I consider the subject of this Discourse one of the most interesting
questions philosophy could propose, and, unfortunately for us, one of the
thorniest that philosophers could resolve. For how are we to know the source of
inequality among men, if we do not begin by understanding men themselves? And
how will man succeed in seeing himself the way nature made him, through all the
changes which the succession of time and things must have produced in his
original constitution, and in disentangling what he retains of his own
fundamental core from the things that circumstances and his progress have added
to or changed in his primitive state? Like the statue of Glaucus, which time,
the sea, and storms have so disfigured that it looks less like a god than a
ferocious beast, so the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a
thousand causes constantly renewed, by the acquisition of huge amounts of
knowledge and errors, by the changes which have taken place in the constitution
of the body, and by the constant shock of the passions, has, so to speak,
changed its appearance to the point where it is almost impossible to recognize.
And in the place of a being always acting according to certain and invariable
principles, in the place of that divine and majestic simplicity which its
Author impressed upon it, we no longer discover anything there but the warped
contrast between passion that believes it is reasoning and a delirious
understanding.

What is even crueler is that all the
progress in the human species constantly takes it further away from its
primitive state. The more we accumulate new kinds of knowledge, the more we
deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of
all, and, in a sense, it is thanks to the study of man that we are now beyond
the condition where we can know him.

It is easy to see that it is in these
successive changes in the human constitution that we must look for the first
origin of the differences which separate men, who, by general opinion, are
naturally as equal among themselves as were the animals of each species before
various physical causes introduced into some of them the varieties we notice
there. In fact, it is inconceivable that these first changes, however they came
about, altered all at once and in the same way all the individuals of the
species. But while some were improved or weakened and acquired various good or
bad qualities not inherent in their nature, others remained for a longer period
in their original state; such was the first source of inequality among men, a
fact which it is thus easier to demonstrate in general than to precisely assign
its real causes.

Let my readers not imagine, therefore,
that I dare flatter myself for having seen something that appears to me so
difficult to see. I have begun some rational lines of enquiry and hazarded some
assumptions, less in the hope of resolving the question than with the intention
of illuminating it and reducing it to its true state. Other people will readily
be able to go further along the same route, although it will not be easy for
anyone to reach the end. For it is no slight undertaking to disentangle what is
original from what is artificial in the present nature of man and to understand
well a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which
probably never will exist, and concerning which it is nevertheless necessary to
have some accurate notions in order to judge properly our present state.
Someone who would endeavor to determine exactly what precautions he should take
in order to make some reliable observations on this subject would require even
more philosophy than one might think, and a good solution to the following
problem would seem to me not unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our age: What experiments would be necessary to reach
an understanding of natural man, and what are the ways of making these
experiments in the bosom of society? Far from attempting to resolve this
problem, I believe I have meditated sufficiently on the subject to venture to
respond in advance that the greatest philosophers will not be too good to
direct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to undertake them. It
is hardly reasonable to expect such cooperation, above all with the
perseverance or rather the continuing enlightenment and goodwill necessary on
both sides to attain success.

This research, so difficult to carry
out, and we have thought about it so little up to this point, is nonetheless
the only means left to us of removing a multitude of difficulties which hide
from us the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this
ignorance of the nature of man that throws so much uncertainty and obscurity
onto the true definition of natural right. For the idea of right, says Mr. Burlamaqui, and even more the idea of natural right, are
manifestly ideas relative to the nature of man.(7)
Hence, it is from this very nature of man, he continues, his constitution and
his condition, from which we must deduce the principles of this science.

It is not without surprise and scandal
that one observes how little agreement prevails on this important matter among
the various authors who have dealt with it. Among the most serious writers
there are hardly two who agree about it. Without mentioning the ancient
philosophers, who seem to have gone to great trouble to contradict each other
on the most basic principles, the Roman jurists subject man and all the other
animals indiscriminately to the same natural law, because under this name they
considered the law nature imposes on herself rather than the one she
prescribes; or rather, because these jurists understood the word law in a particular sense, on this
occasion they seem to have accepted it only as the expression of general
relationships established by nature among all animated beings for their common
preservation. The moderns, understanding under the term lawonly a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to say, to one
that is intelligent, free, and deliberate in its relationships with other
beings, consequently limit the jurisdiction of natural law to the single animal
endowed with reason, that is, to man. However, each of them defines this law in
his own way; they all establish it on such metaphysical principles that there
are, even among us, very few people in a position to understand these
principles, let alone capable of finding them by themselves. As a result, all
the definitions of these scholarly men, in other respects constantly
contradicting each other, agree only on one point: that it is impossible to
understand the law of nature, and hence to obey it, without being a very great
reasoner and a profound metaphysician. And that indicates precisely that, for
the establishment of society, men must have employed an enlightenment that
develops only with a great deal of effort and in very few people, even within
the bosom of society itself.

Since we have such a meager
understanding of nature and there is such poor agreement about the meaning of
the word law, it would be very
difficult to agree on a good definition of natural law. All those we find in
books, aside from the problem that they are not the same, have the additional
fault of being derived from several kinds of knowledge which men do not possess
naturally and from advantages of which they can have no idea until after they
have left the state of nature. These writers begin by investigating the rules
about which, for the sake of common utility, it would be appropriate for men to
agree on among themselves, andthen
they assign the name natural law to the collection of these rules, without any
other proof aside from the benefit which they find would result from their
universal practice. That is surely a very convenient way to come up with
definitions and to explain the nature of things with almost arbitrary reasons.

But so long as we do not know natural
man, it is useless for us to want to determine the law he has received or the
one which best fits his constitution. All we can see very clearly on the
subject of this law is that, in order for it to be a law, it is necessary not
only that the will of the man with an obligation to it is capable of submitting
to it knowingly, but also that, for the law to be natural, it must speak
immediately with nature’s voice.

Thus, setting aside all those
scientific books, which teach us only to see men the way they have made
themselves, and meditating upon the first and simplest operations of the human
soul, I believe I discern there two principles prior to reason: one makes us
passionately interested in our well-being and in our own preservation, and the
other inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sensitive being perish
or suffer, in particular, beings like ourselves. From the cooperation and
combination our mind is able to create of these two principles—without it being
necessary to bring in the principle of sociability—it seems to me, all the
rules of natural right follow, rules which reason is later forced to
re-establish on other foundations, when, through its successive developments,
it has ended up effectively suffocating nature.

In this way, we are not obliged to make
man a philosopher before we make him a man. His obligations towards others are
not dictated to him exclusively by later lessons in wisdom, and so long as he
does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never do harm to
another man, or even to any other sentient being, except in the legitimate case
where, since his preservation is at stake, he is obliged to give preference to
himself. In this way we also end the ancient disputes concerning the
participation of animals in natural law. For it is clear that, lacking
enlightenment and liberty, they cannot recognize this law. But because in some
things they share our nature through the sensibility with which they are
endowed, we judge that they should also share in natural right and that man is
subject to some kind of duties towards them. It seems, in fact, that if I am
obliged not to do any harm to my fellow man, that is not so much because he is
a reasonable being as because he is a sentient being, a quality which, being
common to animals and man, should at least confer on the former the right not
be mistreated for no purpose by the latter.

This same study of original man, of his
true needs, and of the fundamental principles of his duties, is also the only
good method we can use to remove the great many difficulties which present
themselves concerning the origin of moral inequality, the true foundation of
the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand other
similar questions, as important as the explanations for them are inadequate.

When we consider human society with a
calm and disinterested gaze, at first it seems to reveal nothing but the
violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. The mind is revolted
by the harshness of the former, and we tend to deplore the blindness of the
latter. And since nothing is less stable among men than these external
relationships, which chance produces more often than wisdom and which we call
power or weakness, wealth or poverty, human institutions appear at first glance
to be founded on mounds of quicksand. It is not until we look at them closely,
only after we have removed the dust and sand which surround the structure, that
we perceive the unshakeable base on which it has been raised and learn to
respect its foundations. Now, without the serious study of man, of his natural
faculties, and of their successive developments, we will never succeed in
making these distinctions, and in separating in the present constitution of
things what divine will has created from what human art has claimed to do.
Political and moral enquiries which have arisen from the important question I
am examining are thus useful in all sorts of ways, and the hypothetical history
of governments is for man an instructive lesson in every respect. By
considering what we might have become, if we had been left to ourselves, we
should learn to bless Him whose beneficent hand, correcting our institutions
and giving them an unshakeable foundation, prevented the disorders they would
have otherwise produced, and made our happiness emerge from means which seemed
as if they ought to make us completely miserable.

I
have added some notes to this work in accordance with my lazy habit of working
on this and that. These notes wander sometimes so far from the subject that it
is not good to read them with the text. So I have shifted them to the end of
the Discourse, in which I have tried to follow as best I can the most direct
route. Those who have the courage to start again will be able to entertain
themselves a second time by beating the bushes and striving to move through the
notes. If other people do not read them at all, there will be little harm done.

Question

Proposed by the Academy of Dijon

What
is the origin of inequality among men, and is it

authorized
by natural law?

DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATIONS

OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN

I am to speak about man, and the
question I am examining informs me that I am going to be speaking to men, for
one does not propose questions like these when one is afraid of honoring the
truth. Therefore, I will defend with confidence the cause of humanity in front
of the wise men who invite me to do that, and I will not be unhappy with myself
if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.

In the human species I conceive two
forms of inequality: one I call natural or physical, because it is established
by nature and consists of the differences in age, health, bodily strength, and
qualities of the mind or soul; the other we can call moral or political
inequality, because it depends on some kind of convention and because it is
established or at least authorized by the consent of men. This latter form
consists of the different privileges that some men enjoy to the detriment of
others, such as being wealthier, more honored, or more powerful than they are,
or even making other men obey them.

We cannot ask what the source of
natural inequality is, because the answer is expressed in the simple definition
of the word. Even less can we seek whether there might be some essential link
between the two inequalities, for that would be asking, in other terms, if
those who command are necessarily worth more than those who obey, and if the
powers of the body or the mind, wisdom, or virtue are always found in the same
individuals in proportion to power or wealth: it may be a good question to
discuss among slaves while their masters are listening, but one not suitable
for reasonable and free men seeking the truth.

So what precisely is the issue here in
this Discourse? It is to mark in the progress of things the moment where, once
right had taken over from violence, nature was subjected to law, and to explain
by what sequence of astonishing events the strong could resolve to serve the
weak and the people to purchase a notional repose at the expense of genuine
happiness.

Philosophers who have examined the
foundations of society have all sensed the need to go back to the state of
nature, but none of them has arrived there. Some have not hesitated to
attribute to man in this state the idea of the just and unjust, without
taking the trouble to demonstrate that he had to have this idea or even that it
was useful to him. Others have talked about the natural right which each man
has to keep what belongs to him, without explaining what they mean by to belong. Others have begun by
assigning to the strongest the authority over the weakest and have immediately
created governments, without thinking of the time that must have elapsed before
the meaning of the words authority and
government could have existed among
men. Finally, all of them, talking endlessly about need, greed, oppression,
desires, and pride, have brought into the state of nature ideas they had
derived from society. They have spoken about savage man and given a portrait of
civil man. It has not even entered the mind of most of our writers to doubt
whether the state of nature existed, although it is evident from a reading of
the Sacred Books that the first man, once he had received his understanding and
precepts directly from God, was not himself in this state and that, when we
accord to the writings of Moses the faith which every Christian philosopher
owes them, we must deny that, even before the Flood, men ever found themselves
in the pure state of nature, unless they fell back into it by some
extraordinary event. This paradox is very difficult to defend and completely
impossible to prove.

So let us begin by dispensing with all
the facts, for they are not relevant to the question. We must not take the
investigations that one could enter into concerning this subject for historical
truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional arguments, more suitable for
illuminating the nature of things than for showing the true origin, similar to
those our physicists make every day concerning the formation of the earth.
Religion orders us to believe that God Himself took men out of the state of
nature and that they are unequal because He wanted them to be. But it does not
prohibit us from forming conjectures drawn only from the nature of man and of
the beings surrounding him concerning what the human race could have become had
it been left abandoned to itself. That is what I am being asked and what I
propose to examine in this Discourse. Since my subject deals with man in
general, I will try to use a language suitable to all nations; or rather,
forgetting times and places, so that I think only about the men to whom I am
speaking, I will assume that I am in the school of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, with Platos and Xenocrateses for judges,
and the human race as my audience.(9)

O man, no matter what country you are
from, no matter what your opinions may be, listen. Here is your history the way
I believed I read it, not in the books by your fellow men, who are liars, but
in nature, which never lies. Everything that will be from her will be true.
There will be nothing false except what I have mixed in of my own without
wishing to do so. The times of which I am going to speak are far distant. How
much have you changed from what you were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species
that I am going to describe with reference to the qualities you have received,
which your education and your habits may have corrupted, but which they have
not been able to destroy. There is, I sense, an age at which the individual man
would like to stop; you will be seeking the age at which you would wish your
species had stopped. Unhappy with your present condition, for reasons which
announce to your unfortunate descendants even greater discontent, perhaps you
might wish you could go back, and this feeling should be the eulogy of your
first ancestors, the critique of your contemporaries, and the dread of those
who will have the misfortune to live after you.

First Part

However important it may be in order to
form a proper judgment of the natural state of man to consider him from his
very origin and to examine him, so to speak, in the first embryo of the
species, I will not follow his organic structure through its successive
developments. I will not stop to investigate what he could have been at the start
within the animal system in order to become what he finally is. I will not
examine whether, as Aristotle thinks, his long nails were at
first hooked claws, whether he was as hairy as a bear, and whether, moving on
four feet (Note 3)
with his gaze directed at the earth and limited to a horizon of a few paces, he
did not at once demonstrate the nature and extent of his ideas. On this subject
I would be able to form nothing but vague and almost imaginary conjectures.
Comparative anatomy has thus far made too little progress, and the observations
of naturalists are still too uncertain for us to be able to establish on such
foundations the grounds for a solid argument. Thus, without having recourse to
the supernatural knowledge we have in this matter, or taking into account the
changes which must have occurred in the human structure, both internally and
externally, as man applied his limbs to new uses and nourished himself on new
foods, I will assume that he was formed at all times as I see him today, walking
on two feet, using his hands as we use ours, looking around at all of nature,
and measuring with his eyes the vast expanse of the heavens.

By stripping the being formed in this
way of all supernatural gifts he could have received and all the artificial faculties
he could have acquired only by long progress, by considering him, in a word, as
he must have come from the hands of nature, I see an animal less strong than
some, less agile than others, but, taking everything into account, with the
most advantageous structure of all. I see him eating his fill under an oak
tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of
the same tree which provided his meal, and with that his needs are satisfied.

The earth, left to its natural fertility
(Note 4) and
covered with immense forests never mutilated by an axe, offers at every step
storehouses and shelters for animals of every species. The men scattered among
these species observe them, imitate their industry, and thus raise themselves
to the level of animal instinct, with this advantage: each species has only its
own appropriate instinct, while man perhaps has no instinct that belongs to him and so appropriates them all, feeds himself just as well with
most of the various foods (Note 5) the other animals share among themselves, and as
a result finds his subsistence more easily than any of them can.

Accustomed from infancy to intemperate
weather and the rigour of the seasons, inured to fatigue, and forced, naked and
without weapons, to defend their lives and their prey against other ferocious
beasts or to escape them by running off, men develop in themselves a robust and
almost unchangeable temperament. The children bring into the world the
excellent constitution of their fathers, strengthen it through the same
exercises which created it, and in this manner acquire all the vigour of which
the human species is capable. Nature deals with them exactly as the law of
Sparta did with the citizens’ children: it makes those who are well-formed
strong and robust and kills off all the others, differing in this respect from
our societies, where the state, by making children burdensome to their fathers,
kills them indiscriminately before they are born.

Since the savage man’s body is the only
instrument he knows, he employs it for various uses of which, through lack of
practice, our bodies are incapable. Our industry has taken away from us the
strength and agility which necessity obliges him to acquire. If he had had an
axe, would his wrist have broken off such strong branches? Had he had a sling,
would his hand have thrown a stone so hard? Had he had a ladder, would he have
climbed so nimbly up a tree? Had he had a horse, would he have run so quickly?
Leave civilized man the time to collect all his machines around him, and there
is no doubt he would easily overcome savage man. But if you want to see an even
more unequal combat, set them naked and unarmed one against the other. You will
soon recognize the advantage of constantly having all one’s strength at one’s
disposal, of always being ready for any event, and of always
carrying with oneself, so to speak, a completely integrated totality (Note 6).

Hobbes claims that man is naturally
bold and seeks only to attack and fight. An illustrious philosopher thinks the
opposite, and Cumberland and Pufendorf also affirm that nothing is as timid as
man in a state of nature; he is always trembling, ready to run
off at the slightest noise that strikes him, at the least movement he perceives.(10) That may be the case for objects he
does not recognize, and I have no doubt that he is frightened by all new sights
that present themselves to him every time he cannot discern the physical good
and bad he should expect from them, or compare his strength with the dangers he
must encounter—rare circumstances in the state of nature, where everything
proceeds in such a uniform manner and where the face of the earth is not
subject to sudden and constant changes caused by the passions and by the
fickleness of people in groups. But savage man, living dispersed among the
animals and finding himself early on in a position to measure himself against
them, soon makes a comparison, and, sensing that he surpasses them in skill
more than they surpass him in strength, he learns not to fear them anymore. Set
a bear or a wolf to go against a robust savage, skillful and courageous, as
they all are, armed with stones and a good stick, and you will observe that the
danger will at least be reciprocal, and that after several such experiences,
the wild beasts, which do not like to attack each other, will have little
desire to attack man, whom they have discovered is just as ferocious as they
are. As for animals which really do have more strength than he has skill, he is
in their eyes in the position of other weaker species, which nonetheless
continue to survive. But man does have an advantage: being no less able than
they are to run off and finding an almost guaranteed refuge up in the trees, it
is in every case up to him whether to accept or leave the encounter: he must
choose between flight or combat. Let us add that it does not seem that any
animal naturally wars against man, except in cases of its own defense or
extreme hunger, nor does it manifest against him those violent antipathies
which appear to announce that one species is destined by nature to serve as
food for another.

[These are undoubtedly the reasons why
Negroes and savages are so little concerned about the fierce beasts they may
come across in the forest. In this respect the Caribbean [savages] of
Venezuela, among others, live in the most absolute security and without the
slightest inconvenience. Although they are almost naked, says Francisco Coreal,
they are not afraid of exposing themselves in the forest armed only with bows and arrows, but nobody has ever heard of any of them
being eaten by animals.](11)

Other more formidable enemies against
which man does not have the same means of defending himself are the natural
infirmities—infancy, old age, and all kinds of illnesses—sad indications of our
frailty, of which the first two are common to all the animals and the last
belongs principally to man living in society. On the subject of infancy, I even
notice that the mother carries her child everywhere with her and so finds
feeding him a great deal easier than do the females of several animals who are
forced to come and go continuously and grow very weary, moving in one direction
to seek out their food and in another to suckle or feed their young. It is true
that if the female happens to die, the child runs a great risk of perishing
with her. But this danger is common to a hundred other species whose young are
for a long time in no condition to go and look for their food themselves. And if infancy is longer among us, life is so as well. Everything
is still roughly equal in this matter (Note 7), although there are other rules
concerning the duration of the early years and the number of the young (Note 8) which are
not part of my subject.

With the old, who do not move around
much and perspire little, the need for food diminishes with the ability to
provide it, and since the life of savages spares them gout and rheumatism, and
since old age is of all the evils the one which human help can least relieve,
they eventually die without anyone noticing that they no longer exist, and
almost without noticing it themselves.

As far as sicknesses are concerned, I
will not repeat the empty and false rants that the majority of people in good
health deliver against medicine. But I will ask if there is some reliable observation
on the basis of which one could conclude that in the countries where this art
is most neglected, the average life of man is shorter than in those where it is
cultivated with the greatest care. How could that be the case if we give
ourselves more illnesses than medicine can provide us remedies? The extreme
inequality in lifestyle, the excessive idleness of some people, the excessive
labour of others, the ease with which we stimulate and satisfy our appetites
and our sensuality, rich people’s overly sophisticated food, which feeds them
with hot reductions and oppresses them with indigestion, poor people’s bad
food, which most of the time they even go without, a lack that leads them to
overstuff their stomachs greedily when they have an opportunity, staying up
late, every sort of excess, immoderate transports of all the passions, fatigue,
mental exhaustion, distress, and the numberless sorrows which people undergo in
all circumstances and which constantly wear down the soul—there you have the
fatal proofs that most of our troubles are our own work and that we might have
avoided almost all of them had we kept to the simple, uniform, and solitary way
of life nature had prescribed for us.

If she intended for us to be healthy, I
almost venture to affirm that the state of reflection is a condition contrary
to nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal. When we think
about the good constitution of savages, at least of those whom we have not
ruined with our strong liquors, when we realize that they are familiar with
hardly any sicknesses other than wounds and old age, we are very much led to
believe that we could easily produce the history of human illnesses by
following the history of civil societies. That, at least, is the opinion of
Plato, who concludes, on the basis of certain remedies used or approved by
Podalirius and Machaon at the siege of Troy, that various illnesses, which
these remedies should have made flare up, were not at that time known among
men. [And Celsus states that diet, something essential
nowadays, was first invented by Hippocrates.](12)

With so few sources of illness, man in
a state of nature thus has hardly any need for remedies, even less for doctors.
In this respect, the human species is in a condition no worse than all the
others. It is easy to find out from hunters whether, during their hunting, they
find many sick animals. They do come across several that have received major
wounds which have healed very well, or that have had bones, even limbs, broken
and reset without any surgeon other than time or any treatment except their
ordinary life, and that are no less perfectly cured for not having been
tormented with incisions, poisoned by drugs, or worn out with fasting. Finally,
however useful well-administered medicine may be among us, it is still true
that if the sick savage left on his own has nothing to hope for except from
nature, he has, on the other hand, nothing to fear except his illness, a fact
which often renders his situation preferable to ours.

So let us be careful not to confuse
savage man with the men we have before our eyes. Nature treats all the animals
left in her care with a partiality that appears to demonstrate how jealous she
is of this right. In the forests the horse, cat, bull, and even the donkey for the
most part have a greater height; all have a more robust constitution, more
energy, strength, and courage in the forests than in our homes. They lose half
of these advantages by becoming domesticated, and we could say that all our
care in treating these animals well and feeding them ends up merely degrading
them. The same is true of man himself. By becoming sociable and enslaved, he
becomes weak, fearful, and groveling, and his soft and effeminate way of life
ends by enervating both his strength and his courage. Let us add that between
the savage and domesticated conditions, the difference between man and man must
be even greater than the one between beast and beast, for if animal and man
have been treated equally by nature, all the things man gives himself for his
own convenience—more than he does to the animals he tames—are so many
particular causes which make him degenerate more appreciably.

Thus, nudity, lack of habitation, and
going without all of those useless things we believe are so necessary are not
such a great misfortune for these first men or, above all, such a great
obstacle to their preservation. If they do not have hairy skin, they do not
need it in hot countries, and in cold countries they soon learn to appropriate
for their own use the skins of beasts they have overcome. If they have only two
feet for running, they have two arms to provide for their defense and their
needs. Their children perhaps begin to walk late and with difficulty, but their
mothers carry them easily, an advantage missing in other species, where the
mother, if she is chased, finds herself forced to abandon her young or to
regulate her pace to theirs. [There could be a few exceptions to this, for
instance, the animal from the province of Nicaragua which looks like a fox and
has feet like a man’s hand, and which, according to Coreal, has a pouch under
its belly, in which the mother puts her young when she is forced to flee. This
is undoubtedly the same animal as the one calledtlaquatzin
in Mexico. Laet says the female of this species has a similar pouch for the
same purpose.](13)Finally,
unless we assume those unusual and fortuitous combinations of circumstances
which I will mention in what follows and which could very well never have
happened, it is in any event clear that the first who made clothing or a
lodging for himself, was, in doing so, providing himself with some things for
which he had little need, because he had gone without them up to that point,
and because one does not see why, as a grown man, he could not have put up with
a way of life he had endured since he was an infant.

Solitary, idle, and always close to
danger, savage man must like to sleep and have a light sleep, like the animals,
which do not think very much and sleep, so to speak, all the time they are not
thinking. Since his own preservation is almost his only concern, the faculties
he exercises most must be those whose main purpose is attack and defense,
whether to overcome his prey or to protect himself from being the prey of
another animal. By contrast, the organs which do not improve except by softness
and sensuality must remain in a coarse state, which prevents any kind of
refined sensitivity in him. In this respect his senses will be divided: he will
have an extremely rudimentary sense of touch and taste, but the greatest
subtlety of sight, hearing, and smell. Such is the condition of animals
generally, and, according to what travellers report, it is the same with the
majority of savage people. So we should not be astonished that the Hottentots
of the Cape of Good Hope discern with their naked eyes ships on the high seas
at the same distance the Dutch see them with telescopes, or that the savages of
America smell the Spaniards on the trail, just as the best dogs would have been
able to do, or that all these barbaric nations tolerate their nakedness without
difficulty, spice up their taste with peppers, and drink European liquor like
water.

Thus far I have considered only
physical man. Let us now attempt to see him from the metaphysical and moral
side.

In every animal I see only an ingenious
machine to which nature has given senses so that it can re-energize and protect
itself, up to a certain point, from everything that tends to destroy or to
disturb it. I see precisely the same things in the human machine, with this
difference: nature alone causes all the operations in the beast; whereas, man
contributes to his own operation in his capacity as a free agent. One chooses
or refuses by instinct, and the other by an act of freedom. This means that the
beast cannot deviate from the rule prescribed for it, even when it would be
advantageous to do so, and that man does deviate from the rule, often to his
disadvantage. That is why a pigeon would die of hunger next to a bowl filled
with the finest meats, as would a cat sitting on piles of fruit or grain,
although both of them could feed themselves very well on the food they reject,
if they were of a mind to try it. For this reason, dissolute men abandon
themselves to excesses which bring them fever and death, because the mind
corrupts the sense and because the will still speaks when nature is silent.

Every animal has ideas, because it has
senses. It even combines its ideas up to a certain point, and man is no
different from a beast in this respect, except in degree. Some philosophers
have even proposed that there is a greater difference between one man and
another than there is between some men and certain animals. Hence, it is not so
much the understanding that creates the specific distinction between animals and
man, as it is man’s quality of being a free agent. Nature commands every
animal, and the beast obeys. Man experiences the same sensation, but he
recognizes that he is free to agree or to resist, and it is above all in the
consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul reveals itself.
For physics explains in some manner the mechanical working of the senses and
the formation of ideas, but in the power to will, or rather to choose, and in
the feeling of this power, we find only purely spiritual acts, about which
nothing is explained by the laws of mechanics.

But if the difficulties which surround
all these questions leave some room for contesting this difference between man
and animal, there is another very particular quality which distinguishes them
and about which there can be no dispute—that is, the faculty of perfecting
oneself, a faculty which, with the help of circumstances, develops all the
others in succession and which resides among us, as much in the species as in
the individual; whereas an animal is, at the end of a few months, what it will
be all its life, and its species at the end of a thousand years is what it was
during the first year of this millennium. Why is man alone subject to becoming
an imbecile? Is it not because that is when he returns to his primitive
condition and because the beast, which has acquired nothing and also has
nothing to lose, always retains his instinct, whereas man, once he loses by old
age or other accidents everything which his perfectibility
has led him to acquire, falls back in this way even lower than a beast? It
would be sad for us to be forced to concur that this distinctive and almost
unlimited faculty is the source of all the misfortunes of man, that this is
what pulls him by the power of time out of this original condition, in which he
would live through peaceful and innocent days, that it is what gives birth with
the centuries to his enlightenment and his errors, his vices
and his virtues, and eventually makes him the tyrant of himself and of nature (Note 9). It would
be dreadful to be obliged to praise as a benevolent being the man who was the
first to suggest to the inhabitant on the banks of the Orinoco the practice of
tying onto the temples of his children those boards that assure them at least a
portion of their imbecility and their original happiness.

Savage man, left by nature merely to
his instinct, or rather compensated for the instinct he perhaps lacks by
faculties capable of replacing it at first and later raising
him far above it, will thus begin with purely animal functions (Note 10):
perceiving and feeling will be his first condition, which will be common to him
and all the animals. Willing and not willing, desiring and fearing, will be the
first and almost the only operations of his soul, until new circumstances
produce new developments in it.

Whatever moralists may say about the
subject, human understanding owes a great deal to the passions, which, by
common acknowledgment, also owe a great deal to it. It is through their
activity that our reason is perfected. We seek to understand only because we
desire to enjoy, and it is not possible to conceive why someone who has neither
desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason. The passions, in their
turn, originate from our needs and their progress from our knowledge. For we
cannot desire or fear things except through the ideas we can have about them or
by simple natural impulse. And savage man, deprived of every kind of
enlightenment, experiences only the passions of the latter sort:
his desires do not go beyond his physical needs (Note 11). The only good things he knows in
the universe are food, a female, and rest. The only evils he fears are pain and
hunger. I say pain and not death, for an animal will never know what it is to
die, and the knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first
acquisitions man made in moving away from the animal condition.

It would be easy for me, if that were
necessary, to support this opinion with facts and to demonstrate that in all
the nations of the world the progress of the mind has been exactly proportional
to the needs people have received from nature or to those to which they have
been subjected by circumstances, and as a result to the passions which
encouraged them to supply those needs. I would show the arts being born in
Egypt and expanding with the flooding of the Nile; I would follow their
progress among the Greeks, where they were seen to germinate, grow, and rise to
the heavens among the sands and rocks of Attica, without being
able to take root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas.(14) I would observe that in general the
people of the north are more industrious than those of the south, because they
can less afford not to be, as if nature wanted in this way to equal things out
by giving their minds the fertility she denies their soil.

But without relying on the uncertain
testimonies of history, who does not see that everything seems to remove from
savage man the temptation and the means to cease being a savage? His
imagination does not picture anything to him; his heart demands nothing of him.
His modest needs are so easily found at hand, and he is so far from the degree
of knowledge necessary for him to desire to obtain greater knowledge, that he
can possess neither foresight nor curiosity. The spectacle of nature becomes
indifferent to him by becoming familiar. There is always the same order, always
the same revolutions. He does not have the mind to be astonished at the
greatest marvels, and it is not in him that we must look for the philosophy man
needs in order to know how to observe once what he has been looking at every
day. His soul, which nothing troubles, surrenders itself to the single feeling
of his present existence, without any idea of the future, no matter how close
it may be, and his projects, as limited as his views, hardly reach to the end
of the day. Even now the degree of foresight in a native of the Caribbean is
like that: in the morning he sells his cotton bed, and in the evening he comes
crying to buy it back again, for lack of anticipating that he would need it for
the next night.

The more one meditates upon this
subject, the greater the distance from pure sense experience to the simplest
knowledge grows before our eyes, and it is impossible to conceive how a man
could, through his own power alone, without the aid of communication and
without necessity’s goad, have crossed over such an interval. How many
centuries perhaps went by before men were in a position to see some fire other
than the one in the sky? How many different chance events did they need in
order to learn the most common uses of that element? How many times did they
let it go out, before acquiring the art of reproducing it? And how many times
perhaps did each of these secrets die with the man who had discovered it? What
will we say about agriculture, an art which requires so much work and
foresight, which depends on other arts, which is obviously practical only in a
society that has at least begun, and which serves us, not so much to obtain
from the earth foodstuffs that it would provide well enough without
agriculture, as to force from it those preferences that are most to our taste?
But let us suppose that men had multiplied to such an extent that natural
productions were no longer sufficient to feed them, an assumption which,
incidentally, would show that for the human species there was a great advantage
in this way of life. Let us assume that, without forges and without workshops,
tools for farming had fallen from heaven into the hands of savages, that these
men had overcome the mortal hatred they all have for continuous labor, that
they had learned to anticipate their needs so far ahead of time; that they had
guessed how one must cultivate the earth, sow seeds, and plant trees; that they
had discovered the arts of grinding wheat and setting grapes to ferment—all
things they would have had be taught by the gods, since it is inconceivable how
they would have learned them on their own. After all that, what man would be so
insane as to bother cultivating a field which will be stripped by the first
newcomer, either man or beast, who finds this harvest agreeable? And how could
each man decide to spend his life in painful work, when the more he needs the
reward of that labor, the more certain he will be of not receiving it? In a
word, how could this situation encourage men to cultivate the earth, so long as
it has not been divided up among them, that is, so long as the state of nature
has not been abolished?

If we wished to assume that savage man
is as skillful in the art of thinking as our philosophers make him out to be,
if we make him, following their example, into a philosopher himself,
discovering on his own the most sublime truths, creating for himself, by
sequences of very abstract argument, maxims of justice and reason derived from
the love of order in general or from the known will of his Creator—in a word,
if we were to assume that he has a mind with as much intelligence and
enlightenment as he needs, but in fact we find him dull and stupid, what use
would the species derive from all this metaphysics, which could not be
communicated and would perish with the individual who had invented it? What
progress could the human race have made scattered through the woods among the
animals? And up to what point could men have perfected themselves and have
enlightened each other, when they had no fixed domicile and no need for one
another, and so would scarcely meet, perhaps twice in their lives, without
knowing or talking to each other?

If one considers how many ideas we owe
to the use of speech, how much grammar trains and facilitates the operations of
the mind, and one thinks of the inconceivable difficulties and of the infinite
time which the first invention of languages must have cost; if we link these
reflections to the preceding ones, we will be able to judge how many thousands
of centuries it must have taken for the human mind to sequentially develop the
operations it can carry out.

Allow me to consider for a moment the
difficulties concerning the origin of languages. I could content myself with
citing or repeating here the investigations that the Abbé de Condillac has made
into this matter, which all fully confirm my opinion and
perhaps gave me the original idea about it.(15)
But because the way in which this philosopher resolves the difficulties he
makes for himself concerning the origin of established signs shows that he has
assumed what I am putting into question—that is, a kind of society already
established among the inventors of language—I believe that in referring to his
reflections I ought to add my own to them in order to throw some light on these
same difficulties in a manner appropriate to my subject. The first one that
presents itself is to imagine how languages could have become necessary. For
since men had no connections with each other, nor any need for them, one can
conceive neither why this invention was necessary nor how it was possible,
unless it was indispensable. I could well say, as do many others, that
languages were born in the domestic interaction of fathers, mothers, and
children.But aside from the fact that
this would not resolve the objections, it would be committing the fault of
those who, in reasoning about the state of nature, bring into it ideas taken
from society and always see the family gathered together in the same dwelling
with its members maintaining among themselves a union as intimate and as
permanent as among us, where so many common interests keep them together;
whereas, in this primitive condition, having neither house, nor huts, nor any
kind of property, each man found his own lodging randomly, and often only for
one night. The males and females came together fortuitously, according to
chance encounters, opportunity, and desire, without speech
being very necessary to interpret things they had to tell each other. They
separated just as easily (Note 12). At first the mother suckled her children to
satisfy her own need; then, once the habit made them dear to her, she later fed
them to meet their needs. As soon as they had the strength to seek out their
own food, they did not hesitate to leave the mother, and since there was hardly
any way of finding each other again other than not to lose sight of one
another, they were soon at the stage where they did not even recognize each other.
Bear in mind as well that since the child has all his needs to explain, and
consequently more things to say to the mother than the mother has to say to the
child, it is the child who must play the most significant role in inventing
language, and that the one it uses must be in large part its own work, which
multiplies languages by as many individuals as there are to speak them.
Contributing further to this is a wandering and vagabond life that does not
give any idiom time to acquire consistency. For to say that the mother dictates
to her child the words which it must use to ask her for something or other
explains well enough how one teaches languages that are already formed but not
how they are formed.

Suppose we have overcome this first
difficulty. Let us for a moment move across the immense space that must have
existed between the pure state of nature and the need for
languages, and, assuming they are necessary (Note 13), let us examine how they could have
started to get established. Here is a new difficulty, even worse than the
previous one. For if men needed speech in order to learn how to think, they had
an even greater need to know how to think in order to discover the art of
speech. And even if we understood how vocal sounds were taken as the conventional
interpreters of our ideas, it would still remain to know what in this
convention could have been the particular interpretative sounds for those ideas
which have no sensible object and thus could be indicated neither by gesture
nor by voice, so that we can hardly form plausible conjectures about the origin
of this art of communicating thoughts and establishing an exchange among minds,
a sublime art which is already so distant from its origin, but which the
philosopher still sees at such an enormous distance from its perfection that
there is no man sufficiently bold to affirm that it will ever reach that point,
even if the revolutions which time necessarily brings on should be suspended in
its favor, and if prejudices were to leave the academies or remain silent
before them, and if they could keep themselves working uninterrupted on this
thorny issue for entire centuries.

Man’s first language, the most
universal language, the most energetic, and the only one he needed before he
had to persuade groups of men, is the cry of nature. Since this cry was dragged
out only by a kind of instinct in urgent situations, to plead for assistance in
great dangers or for relief in violent distress, it was not used very much in
the ordinary course of life, where more moderate sentiments prevail. When men’s
ideas began to expand and multiply, and when closer communication was
established among them, they looked for more numerous signs and a more
extensive language. They multiplied their vocal inflections and added gestures to
them, which by their nature are more expressive and whose sense depends less on
a previous determination. Thus, they expressed visible and moving objects by
gestures and those that strike the ear by imitative sounds. But since a gesture
indicates almost nothing except present objects, or those easy to describe, and
visible actions, and since it is not universally applicable, for darkness or
the interposition of a body makes it useless, and since it demands rather than
attracts attention, they finally got the idea of substituting for gestures
vocal articulations, which, without having the same relationship to particular
ideas, are more appropriate to represent them all as established signs. This
substitution could not be made except by common agreement and in a manner
difficult enough to practice for men whose rudimentary vocal organs had not yet
had any exercise and still more difficult to conceive in itself, since this
common accord must have been motivated, and speech appears to have been
extremely necessary for its use to be established.

We must assume that since the first
words which men made use of had in their minds a much more extensive meaning
than those we use in languages already formed, and that since they knew nothing
about the division of speech into its constitutive parts, at first they gave
each word the sense of an entire proposition. Once they began to distinguish
the subject from the predicate and the verb from the noun, which was no mean
effort of genius, the substantives at first were nothing more than so many
proper nouns, the [present] infinitive was the only verb tense, and as far as
adjectives are concerned, the idea for them must have developed only with great
difficulty, because every adjective is an abstract word and abstractions are
difficult and not very natural operations.

Every object at first was given a
particular name, without regard to kinds and species, something which those
first inventors were not in a position to distinguish, and all the discrete
entities presented themselves to their minds as in isolation, as they do in the
picture of nature. If one oak tree was called A, another oak tree was called B.
[For the first idea one derives from two things is that they are not the same.
Often a good deal of time is necessary to observe what they have in common.]
Hence, the more limited their knowledge, the more extensive their dictionary
became. The inconvenience of all this nomenclature could not have been easily
removed, for to arrange beings under common and generic denominations, one had
to know their properties and their differences. This required observations and
definitions, that is, natural history and metaphysics, a great deal more than
the men of those times could have had.

Furthermore, general ideas cannot be
introduced into the mind except with the help of words, and the understanding
does not grasp them except by propositions. That is one of the reasons why
animals cannot form such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility that
depends on them. When a monkey goes without hesitation from one nut to another,
do we think it has a general idea of this sort of fruit and that it compares
its archetype to these two individual nuts? Undoubtedly not; but the sight of
one of these nuts recalls to its memory sensations which it received from the
other, and its eyes, modified in a certain way, announce to its taste the
modification it is about to receive. Every general idea is purely intellectual.
Once the imagination gets involved in the slightest, the idea immediately
becomes particular. Try to draw for yourself the image of a tree in general;
you will never succeed. In spite of yourself, it must be seen as small or
large, sparse or leafy, light or dark, and if you were able to see there only
what is found in every tree, that image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely
abstract entities are seen in the same manner or are conceived only through
discourse. Only the definition of the triangle gives you the true idea of it.
As soon as you draw one in your mind, it is such and such a triangle and not
another, and you cannot avoid giving it perceptible lines or a colored surface.
We must therefore articulate propositions, and we have to speak in order to
have general ideas. For as soon as the imagination stops, the mind moves no further
except with the help of discourse. Hence, if the first inventors could give
names only to ideas that they had already, it follows that these first
substantives could never have been anything but proper nouns.

But when, by methods which I do not
understand, our new grammarians began to extend their ideas and to generalize
their words, the ignorance of the inventors must have subjected this method to
very narrow limits, and since they had at the beginning excessively multiplied
the names of discrete entities because they did not know about genera and
species, they later created too few species and genera, for lack of having
considered beings by all their differences. To push these divisions far enough
would have required more experience and enlightenment than they could have had,
along with more research and work than they wanted to spend on it. Now, if,
even today, we are discovering every day new species which so far have escaped
all our observations, think how many must have been hidden from men who did not
judge things except by their first appearance! As for primitive classes and the
most general notions, it is superfluous to add that these must have escaped
them as well. How, for example, would they have imagined or understood the
words matter, mind, substance, mode, figure, and movement, given that our
philosophers, who have made use of them for such a long time, themselves have
real difficulty understanding them and that, since the ideas attached to these
words are purely metaphysical, they found no model of them in nature?

I stop with these first steps, and I
beg my judges to suspend their reading here, in order to consider, in this
matter of the invention of physical substantives alone, that is to say, of the
part of language easiest to discover, the road language must still travel to
express all the thoughts of men, to take on a constant form, to be able to be
spoken in public, and to influence society. I beg them to
reflect on the time and knowledge it must have required to find numbers (Note 14),
abstract words, aorists, and all the verb tenses, particles, and syntax, to
connect propositions and arguments, and to form the entire logic of discourse.
As for myself, frightened by the multiplying difficulties and convinced of the
almost proven impossibility that languages could have arisen and established
themselves by purely human means, I leave to whoever wishes to undertake it the
discussion of the following difficult problem: Which was more necessary, that
society be already in place for the institution of languages or that languages
be already invented for the establishment of society?

Whatever these origins may be, at least
we see, from the little care which nature took to bring men together through
their mutual needs and to facilitate the use of speech for them, how little she
prepared them for sociability and how little she contributed of her own to
everything they have done in order to establish social bonds. In fact, it is
impossible to imagine why, in this primitive state, one man would have more
need of another man than a monkey or a wolf would of a creature like itself,
or, if we assume this need, what motive could persuade the other man to provide
it, or even, in this last case, how they could mutually agree on terms. I know
that people constantly repeat to us that nothing would have been so miserable
as man in this state and, if it is true, as I believe I have proved, that man
could not have had the desire and the opportunity to leave this state until
after several centuries, that would be an indictment against nature and not
against the one she had constituted in this way. But if I understand this term miserable properly, it is a word that
has no meaning, or that signifies only a painful lack and a physical or
spiritual suffering. Now, I really would like someone to explain to me what
type of misery there could be for a free being whose heart is at peace and
whose body is healthy. I ask the following: Which is more subject to becoming
unbearable for those who enjoy it, a civil or natural life? Around us we see
hardly any people who do not complain about their existence and several who
even take their own lives, to the extent they are capable of it, and the
combination of divine and human laws is scarcely sufficient to check this
disorder. I ask, has anyone ever heard it said that a savage at liberty has so
much as dreamed of complaining about life and of killing himself? Thus people should
judge with less pride on which side true misery lies. By contrast, nothing
would have been as miserable as savage man dazzled by enlightenment, tormented
by passions, and reasoning about a state different from his own. It was thanks
to a very wise providence that the potential faculties he had were to develop
only with opportunities to practice them, so that they were neither superfluous
nor a bother to him before then, nor belated and useless when needed. He had in
instinct alone everything he needed to live in a state of nature, and in a
cultivated reason has only what he needs to live in society.

At first it seems that since men in
this state did not have any kind of moral relations among themselves or any
known duties, they could not have been either good or bad or have had either
vices or virtues, unless we take these words in a physical sense and call vices
in the individual the qualities which can injure his own preservation and
virtues those which can contribute to it, in which case we would have to call
the most virtuous men those who least resisted the simple natural impulses. But
without moving away from the ordinary meaning of these words, it is appropriate
to suspend the judgment we could bring to bear on such a situation and to
resist our prejudices until, scale in hand, we have examined if there are more
virtues than vices among civilized men, or if their virtues are more
advantageous than their vices calamitous, or if the progress of their knowledge
is a sufficient compensation for the evils they inflict on one another, as they
learn about the good they ought to do, or if, taking everything into account,
they would not be in a happier situation if they did not have anything bad to
fear or good to hope for from anyone, rather than being subjected to universal
dependency and obliged to receive everything from those who are not obligated
to give them anything.

Above all, let us not conclude with
Hobbes that, since man has not the slightest idea of goodness, he is naturally
wicked, that he is vicious because he does not know virtue, that he always
denies his fellows services which he does not believe he owes them, and that,
by virtue of the right which he reasonably attributes to himself to things he
needs, he wildly imagines that he alone owns the entire universe. Hobbes saw
very well the defect of all the modern definitions of natural right, but the conclusions
he draws from his own show that he took it in a sense that is no less
erroneous. By reasoning on the basis of the principles he established, this
author should have said that since the state of nature is the one in which care
for our own preservation is the least prejudicial to the preservation of
others, this state was therefore the most appropriate to peace and the most
suitable for the human race. He says precisely the opposite, because he made
the mistake of allowing into savage man’s care for his own preservation the
need to satisfy a multitude of passions that are the work of society and have
made laws necessary. The wicked man, he says, is a robust child. But whether
savage man is a sturdy child remains to be known. If we granted him this point,
what would he conclude from it? That if, when he is robust, this man was just
as dependent on others as when he is weak, there is no kind of excess to which
he would not be carried: he would strike his mother when she was too late
giving him her teat, he would strangle one of his young brothers when he
annoyed him, and he would bite someone else’s leg when it struck or bothered
him. But being robust and being dependent in the state of nature are two
contradictory assumptions. Man is weak when he is dependent, and he is free
before he is robust. Hobbes did not see that the same cause that prevents
savages from using their reason, as our jurists claim, prevents them at the
same time from abusing their faculties, as he himself claims, so that we could
say that savages are not evil precisely because they do not know what it is to
be good. For it is neither the development of enlightenment nor the restraint
of law which prevents them from doing evil, but the tranquility of their
passions and their ignorance of vice: That is how much more ignorance of vice is profitable to those men,
than a knowledge of virtue is to these.(16)There is, in
addition, another principle, which Hobbes did not notice, and which, having
been given to man to soften, in certain circumstances, the
ferocity of his amour propre or,
before the birth of this love, the desire to preserve himself (Note 15),
tempers the ardour he has for his well-being by an innate repugnance to seeing
a creature like himself suffer. I do not think I have to fear any contradiction
by ascribing to man the only natural virtue that the most extravagant detractor
of human virtues has been forced to recognize. I am speaking of pity, a
disposition appropriate to beings as weak and subject to as many evils as we
are, a virtue all the more universal and all the more useful to man because in
him it comes before he uses any reflection and is so natural that even beasts
occasionally provide some perceptible signs of it. Without speaking of the
tenderness of mothers towards their young and the dangers they face to keep
them safe, we see every day the repugnance of horses at stepping on a living
body. An animal does not move past a dead animal of its own species without
unease. There are even some who give them a kind of burial. And the sad lowing
of cattle as they move into a slaughterhouse indicates the impression they get
of the horrific spectacle which strikes them. With pleasure we see the author
of the Fable of the Bees compelled to
recognize man as a compassionate and sensitive being and, in the example he
gives of that, moving away from his cold and subtle style, in order to offer us
the pathetic image of a man in prison who notices outside a ferocious beast
ripping a child from its mother’s breast, crushing its weak
limbs in its murderous teeth, and ripping out with its claws this child’s
quivering entrails.(17)
What horrific agitation must be felt by this witness to an event in which he
has no personal interest? What agonies does he not suffer from the sight and
from his inability to bring any help to the fainting mother or the dying child?

That is what the pure movement of
nature is like, before all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which
the most depraved morals still have trouble destroying, since we see every day
in our theatres a man being moved and weeping at the troubles of some
unfortunate person, the kind of man who, if he were in a tyrant’s position,
would increase even more his enemy’s torments[like bloodthirsty Sulla, who was so sensitive to the evils he had
not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the
performance of any tragedy for fear he might be seen weeping with Andromache
and Priam, and who nonetheless listened without feeling anything to the
cries of so many citizens who were butchered on his orders
every day: By giving tears, nature
reveals that she gave the human race the softest hearts].(18)

Mandeville well perceived that with all
their morality human beings would never have been anything but monsters, if
nature had not given them pity to assist their reason. But he did not see that
from this quality alone follow all the social virtues that he wants to deny to
men. In fact, what are generosity, clemency, and humanity, if not pity applied
to the weak, to the culpable, or to the human species in general? Even
benevolence and friendship, properly understood, are products of a constant
pity fixed on a particular object. For what is desiring that someone does not
suffer other than desiring that he is happy? Even if it were true that
commiseration was merely a feeling which places us in the position of the
person suffering, an obscure and lively sentiment in savage man, and developed
but weak in civil man, how would this idea affect the truth of what I am
saying, unless to reinforce it? In fact, commiseration will be all the more
intense as the animal looking on identifies more intimately with the suffering
animal. Now, it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely
closer in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. It is reason that
gives rise to amour propre, and it is
reflection that strengthens it. Reason is what turns man back onto himself; it
is what separates him from everything which upsets and afflicts him. It is
philosophy that isolates him. It is by way of it that he says in secret, at the
sight of a man suffering: “Perish if you wish; I am safe.” Nothing troubles the
calm sleep of the philosopher and drags him from his bed any more, other than
dangers to all of society. One can slit the throat of his fellow man under the
philosopher’s window with impunity; he has only to put his hands over his ears
and argue with himself for a little while in order to prevent nature, which
rebels within him, from identifying with the one being murdered. Savage man
does not have this admirable talent and, for lack of wisdom and reason, is
always surrendering to the first feeling of humanity, without thinking about
it. In riots and street quarrels, the populace crowds together, while the
prudent man moves away. It is the riff-raff, it is the women of the market who
separate the combatants and prevent honest folk from cutting each other’s
throats.

Hence, it is certain that pity is a
natural feeling that, by moderating in each individual the activities of his amour de soi-même, contributes to the
mutual preservation of the entire species. It is pity that prompts us without
reflection to help those we see suffering and which, in the state of nature,
takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue, with this advantage: no one is
tempted to disobey its sweet voice. It is pity that will deter every robust
savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of the subsistence they
have with difficulty acquired, if he himself hopes to be able to find his own
elsewhere. It is pity that, in the place of this sublime maxim of rational
justice—Do unto others what you wish they
do unto you—inspires in all men this other maxim of natural goodness, much
less perfect than the preceding one, but perhaps more useful: Do what is good for you with the least
possible harm to others. Briefly put, it is in this natural sentiment
rather than in subtle arguments that we must seek out the cause of the
repugnance that all men would experience at doing wrong, even independently of
educational maxims. Although it could be appropriate for Socrates and minds of
his caliber to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would have ceased
to be a long time ago, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasoning
of those who constitute it.

With passions so little active, and
with such a healthy restraint, men more wild than evil and more attentive to
keeping themselves from the harm they could receive than tempted to commit harm
to others were not subject to very dangerous quarrels. Since they had no type
of interaction with each other and, as a result,
had no knowledge of vanity or respect or esteem or contempt, since they did not
have the least notion of yours and mine or any genuine idea of justice,
since they looked upon the violence which they could run into as an easily redressed
harmrather than an affront one must
punish, and since they did not even dream of vengeance, except perhaps as an
immediate mechanical reflex, like the dog that bites the stone thrown at him,
their disputes would rarely have had bloody consequences, if they had no
subject more pressing than food. But I see a more dangerous matter about which
I still have to speak.

Among the passions which disturb man’s
heart, there is one which is ardent and impetuous and which makes one sex
necessary to the other, a terrible passion that defies all dangers, overturns
all obstacles, and in its fury seems likely to destroy the human race which it
is destined to preserve. What would become of men in the grip of this frantic
and brutal rage, without shame, without modesty, and fighting every day over
their loves at the expense of their blood?

First, we must acknowledge that the
more violent the passions are, the more laws are necessary to contain them. But
setting aside the fact that the disorders and crimes that the passions cause
every day among us sufficiently demonstrate the inadequacy of laws in this
matter, it would still be good to examine if these disorders were not born with
the laws themselves. Thus, if they were capable of repressing these disorders,
the least we should demand of laws would be that they stop an evil which would
not exist without them.

Let us begin by distinguishing the
moral from the physical in the feeling of love. The physical is that general
desire which encourages one sex to unite with the other; the moral is what
determines this desire and fixes it on a single object exclusively, or which at
least provides it with a greater degree of energy for this preferred object.
Now, it is easy to see that the moral aspect of love is an artificial
sentiment, born from social habit and celebrated by women with a great deal of
skill and care in order to establish their sway and to make dominant the sex
that should obey. Since this feeling is founded on certain notions of merit or
beauty that a savage is in no condition to have, and on comparisons he is not
capable of making, it must be almost nothing for him. For as his mind could not
form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, so his heart is no more
susceptible to the sentiments of admiration and love which, even imperceptibly,
arise from the application of these ideas. He listens exclusively to the
temperament he has received from nature, not to the taste he could not have
acquired, and any woman is fine with him.

Limited solely to the physical aspect
of love, and happy enough to be ignorant of those preferences which stimulate
sentiment and increase the difficulties it causes, men must feel the ardor of
their temperaments less frequently and less vividly, and thus the disputes
among them must be rarer and less cruel. The imagination, which creates so many
ravages among us, does not speak to savage hearts. Each man waits peacefully
for the natural impulse, surrenders to it without choice and with more pleasure
than fury, and once the need is satisfied, all desire is extinguished.

It is thus indisputable that love
itself, like all the other passions, only acquires in society that impetuous
ardour that makes it so often fatal to men, and it is all the more ridiculous
to picture savages continually slitting each other’s throats in order to
satisfy their brutality, since this view is directly contrary to experience: of
all existing people, those in the Caribbean are the ones who, up to this point,
have strayed the least from the state of nature, and they are precisely the
ones who are the most peaceful in their loves and the least subject to
jealousy, even though they live in a burning climate which always seems to
generate greater activity in these passions.

With respect to the conclusions we
could draw in several species of animals from the fighting of the males, who in
every season bloody our barnyards or make our forests in springtime echo with
their cries, as they quarrel over the female, we must begin by excluding all
species where nature has manifestly established in the relative power of the
sexes relationships different from those among us. Thus, one can draw no
conclusion about the human species from fights among roosters. In species where
proportion is better observed, these fights can be caused only by the scarcity
of females with respect to the number of males, or by the exclusive periods
during which the female constantly refuses the male’s approach, a factor which
goes back to the first cause. For if each female endures the male only for two
months of the year, that is, in this matter, as if the number of females were
reduced by five-sixths. Now, neither of these two cases applies to the human
species, where the number of females generally surpasses the number of males
and where no one has ever observed, even among savages, that females have times
of heat and of exclusion, like those in other species. Moreover, since with
several of these animals the entire species goes into heat at the same time,
there comes a terrible moment of common passion, tumult, disorder, and combat,
a time which has no place among the human species, where love is never
intermittent. Hence, we cannot conclude from the fights among certain animals
for the possession of the females that the same thing would happen to man in
the state of nature. And even if we could draw this conclusion, since these
quarrels do not destroy other species, we must at least grant that they would
not be any more fatal to ours, and it is very apparent that they would cause
even fewer ravages in that state than they do in society, above all in the
countries where, because morality still counts for something, the jealousy of
lovers and the vengeance of husbands every day cause duels, murders, and worse,
where the obligation to be eternally faithful serves only to produce
adulteries, and where even the laws dealing with continence and honour
necessarily foster debauchery and multiply abortions.

Let us conclude that wandering in the
forests without labor, without speech, without a home, without war, and without
relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and similarly with no desire to
harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them individually,
savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, would have had only
the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to this state. He would have felt
nothing but his true needs and looked only at what he believed he had an
interest in seeing. His intelligence would have progressed no further than his vanity.
If by chance he made some discovery, he could no more have communicated it than
he could have recognized even his own children. Art died with the inventor.
There was neither education nor progress. The generations multiplied aimlessly,
and, since each one always set out from the same point, the centuries flowed
past in all the coarseness of the first ages. The species was already old, and
man remained a child.

If I have dwelt for so long on the
hypothesis of this primitive condition, it is because, having ancient errors
and inveterate prejudices to destroy, I thought I should dig right down to the
root and, in a picture of the true state of nature, show how far inequality,
even natural inequality, is from being as real and having as much influence in this
state as our writers claim.

In fact, it is easy to see that among
the differences that distinguish men, several are considered natural which are
exclusively the work of habit and of the different ways of life men adopt in
society. Thus, a sturdy or delicate temperament, along with the strength or
weakness which stems from it, often come more from the rough or effeminate
manner in which one has been raised than from the body’s original constitution.
It is the same with the forces of the mind. Education not only establishes a
difference between cultivated minds and those that are not, but it increases
the difference among the former group in proportion to their culture. For if a
giant and a dwarf walk along the same route, each pace the two of them take will
give a new advantage to the giant. Now, if we compare the prodigious diversity
in the forms of education and ways of life which prevail in the different
orders of the civil state with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and
savage life, where everyone feeds on the same foods, lives in the same manner,
and does exactly the same things, we will understand how much the difference
between man and man must be less in the state of nature than in society, and
how much natural inequality must increase in the human species as a result of
the inequality of institution.

But if nature, in the distribution of
her gifts, were inclined to show as much preference as people claim, what
advantage would the most favored have derived from that to the detriment of
others in a state of things which does not admit of hardly any sort of relation
between them? Where there is no love, what use will beauty serve? What is the
use of intelligence for people who do not speak, and deception for those who
have no dealings with others? I always hear it repeated that the strongest will
oppress the weak. But let someone explain to me what they mean by this word oppression.

Some will dominate with violence;
others will groan, enslaved to all their whims: that is precisely what I observe
among us. But I do not see how that could be said of savage men, since it would be very difficult even to make
them understand what servitude and domination are. One man will be readily
able seize the fruits which someone else has gathered, the game he has killed,
or the den that served as his refuge. But how will he ever succeed in making
another man obey him, and what could be the chains of dependence among men who
possess nothing? If someone chases me away from a tree, I leave it to go to
another. If someone torments me in one place, who will stop me from moving on
somewhere else? Is a man to be found whose strength is sufficiently superior to
mine and who is, in addition, sufficiently depraved, sufficiently lazy, and
sufficiently ferocious to compel me to provide his subsistence while he remains
idle? He would have to resolve not to let me out of his sight for a single
instant and to keep me bound with very great care while he slept, for fear I
should escape or kill him. In other words, he is obliged to expose himself
voluntarily to a great deal more trouble than he wishes to avoid and more than
he gives me. After all that, does he relax his vigilance momentarily? Does an
unexpected noise make him turn his head? I take twenty paces into the forest, my
chains are broken, and he does not see me again in his life.

Without needlessly prolonging these
details, everyone should see that, since the bonds of servitude are not formed
except by the mutual dependency of men and by the reciprocal needs which unite them,
it is impossible to subjugate a man without previously putting him in a
situation where he is unable to do without someone else. Since this condition
does not exist in the state of nature, it leaves each man in it free of the
yoke and voids the law of the strongest.

Now that I have proved that inequality
is hardly perceptible in the state of nature and that its influence there is
almost nothing, it remains for me to show its origin and its progress in the
successive developments of the human mind. Having demonstrated that perfectibility, the social virtues, and
the other faculties which natural man received in a potential form could never
have developed on their own, that for this to happen they needed the fortuitous
combination of several foreign causes, which might never have arisen and
without which he would have lived forever in his primitive condition, I still
have to consider and reconcile the different accidents which could have
perfected human reason while degrading the species, made a being wicked while
making him sociable, and from such a remote time finally led man and the world
to the point where we see them.

I confess that since the events I have
to describe could have come about in several ways, I am not able to choose
except by conjecture. But apart from the fact that these conjectures become
reasons when they are the most probable that can be derived from the nature of
things and are the only means we can have for discovering the truth, the
consequences I wish to deduce from mine will not, for that reason, be
speculation; because on the principles that I have just established, one could
not form any other system which does not provide me with the same results and
from which I could not draw the same conclusions.

This will spare me from expanding my
reflections on how the lapse of time compensates for the small probability of
events, about the surprising power of very slight causes when they are
constantly at work, about the impossibility, on the one hand, of destroying
certain hypotheses, even though, on the other hand, we cannot give them the
certainty of facts about how, when two facts, given as true, are to be linked
by a sequence of intermediate facts that are unknown or regarded as such, it is
up to history, when one has it, to present the facts which link them and, when
the history is absent, it is up to philosophy to determine similar facts which
could link them; finally, about how, where the events are concerned, similarity
reduces the facts to a much smaller number of different classes than one might
imagine. It is sufficient for me to offer these things to the consideration of
my judges; it is enough for me to have done so in such a way that ordinary
readers have no need to consider them.

Second Part

The first man who, after enclosing a
piece of land, got the idea of saying This
is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder
of civil society. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what miseries and
horrors would someone have spared the human race by pulling out the stakes or
filling in the ditch and crying out to his fellows, “Stop listening to this
imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the land belong to
everyone and the earth belongs to no one.” But it appears very likely that by this
time things had already come to the point where they could no longer continue
as they were. For this idea of property depends on many previous ideas that
could only have arisen in succession and thus was not formed in the human mind
all at once. A good deal of progress was necessary: men had to acquire
significant industry and enlightenment, and transmit and increase them from one
era to the next, before arriving at this last stage in the state of nature. So
let us take up these matters from the beginning and try to gather from a single
perspective this slow sequence of events and knowledge in their most natural
order.

Man’s first sensation was that of his
existence; his first care was his preservation. The productions of the earth
provided him with all the help necessary. Instinct prompted him to make use of
them. Hunger and other appetites made him try in turn various ways of life.
There was one that urged him to perpetuate his species, and this blind impulse,
lacking all heartfelt sentiment, produced only a purely animal act. The need
satisfied, the two sexes no longer recognized each other, and even the child
was nothing to the mother as soon as it could do without her.

Such was the condition of emerging man;
such was the life of an animal limited at first to pure sensations, scarcely
profiting from the gifts that nature offered him, and a long way from dreaming
of wresting anything away from her. But difficulties soon presented themselves
that he had to learn to overcome: the heights of trees which prevented him from
reaching their fruits, the competition with animals who were seeking to eat
these fruits, and the ferocity of those who wanted to take his life over
them—everything required him to apply himself to exercising his body. He had to
make himself agile, a fast runner, and vigorous in combat. Natural weapons—tree
branches and stones—were soon found at hand. He learned to overcome natural
obstacles, to fight other animals when necessary, to contend for his
subsistence even with other men, or to compensate for what he had to cede to
the stronger.

As the human race spread out, the
difficulties multiplied with the men. Different terrains, climates, and seasons
could force them to establish different ways of life. Some barren years, long
harsh winters, and burning summers that consume everything demanded from them
new industry. Along the sea and rivers, they invented line and hook and became
fishermen and fish-eaters. In the forests they made bows and arrows and became
hunters and warriors. In cold countries, they covered themselves with the hides
of beasts they had killed. Lightning, a volcano, or some fortunate accident
gave them knowledge of fire, a new resource against the rigours of winter. They
learned to preserve this element, then to reproduce it, and finally to use it
for preparing meat, which heretofore they had devoured raw.

This repeated application of beings
different from himself and from each other must have naturally engendered in
man’s mind perceptions of certain connections. Those relationships which we
express by the words large, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, fearful, bold, and other similar ideas, which he
compared when necessary and almost without thinking about it, finally produced
in him some sort of reflection or rather a mechanical prudence which indicated
to him the precautions most essential to his safety.

The
new enlightenment that resulted from this development increased his superiority
over other animals by making him aware of it. He practiced setting traps for
them, he fooled them in a thousand ways, and although several surpassed him in
their fighting strength or in running speed, over time he became the master of
those that could serve him and the scourge of those that could harm him. That
is why the first time he glanced at himself produced in him the initial
stirring of pride, and why, when he still hardly knew how to distinguish ranks,
he looked at himself as pre-eminent of his species and prepared himself from a
great distance to make that claim as an individual.

Although his fellow men were not for
him what they are for us, and he had hardly more interaction with them than
with the other animals, they were not forgotten in his observations. After a
while, he was able to observe conformities among them, his female, and himself.
These made him judge those he did not perceive, and seeing that they all
behaved as he would have done in similar circumstances, he concluded that their
way of thinking and feeling was entirely similar to his own. This important
truth, once firmly established in his mind, made him follow by a premonition as
certain and more rapid than rational logic the best rules of conduct which were
appropriate to use with them for his own advantage and security.

Taught by experience that love of
well-being is the only motive for human actions, he found himself in a position
to distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make him count on
the assistance of his fellow men, and the even rarer times when competition
should make him distrust them. In the first case, he joined up with them in a
herd or at most in some sort of free association with obligations for none and
which lasted only as long as the temporary need which had created it. In the
second case, each man sought to secure his own advantage, whether by overt
force, if he believed he could, or by skill and subtlety, if he felt himself
the weaker.

That is how men were able imperceptibly
to acquire some rough idea of mutual undertakings and of the advantage of
fulfilling them, but only to the extent that present and perceptible interest
could demand it. For looking ahead meant nothing to them, and, far from
concerning themselves with a distant future, they did not think even about the
next day. If it was a matter of catching a deer, each man sensed well that to
do so he should keep his position faithfully. But if a hare happened to go past
within reach of one of them, one can be sure he went after it without a scruple
and, having caught his prey, cared very little about making his companions lose
theirs.

It is easy to understand that this sort
of interaction did not require a language much more sophisticated than that of
crows or monkeys, who muster in groups in almost the same manner. Some
inarticulate cries, lots of gestures and some imitative noises must have made
up the universal language for a long time. Since in each country some
articulated and agreed-upon signs were added to this, the establishment of
which, as I have already said, is not very easy to explain, there were
particular languages, but crude and imperfect ones, almost like those various
savage nations still have today. Under the pressure of time passing, the
profusion of things I have to say, and the
almost imperceptible progress of the beginnings, I am racing through countless
centuries, for the more slowly the events succeeded one another, the more
quickly they can be described.

At last these first advances made man
capable of making more rapid ones. The more his mind was enlightened, the more
his industry was perfected. Soon he ceased to sleep under the first tree or to
withdraw into caverns. He made hatchets of some kind from hard, sharp stones
which served to cut wood, dig the earth, and build huts out of branches, and he
later got the idea of coating these with clay and mud. This was the age of a
first revolution that led to the establishment and differentiation of families
and introduced a form of property, from which perhaps even then arose many
quarrels and fights. However, as the strongest were probably the first to make
themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, it is plausible that the
weak ones found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to dislodge
them. And as for those who already had huts, none of them could have had much
inclination to take over his neighbor’s, not so much because it did not belong
to him as because it was useless to him, and because he could not have seized
it without engaging in a very intense fight with the family that occupied it.

The first developments of the heart
were the result of a new situation that united husbands and wives, fathers and
children in one common dwelling. The habit of living together gave rise to the
most tender feelings known to men: conjugal and paternal love. Each family
became a small society, all the more unified since mutual attachment and
freedom were its only bonds. It was then that arose the first difference in the
ways of life of the two sexes, which up to this point had had only one. The
women became more sedentary and grew accustomed to looking after the hut and
the children, while the man went off to search for their common subsistence. In
this way, through a slightly softer life, the two sexes began to lose something
of their ferocity and vigor. But if each one separately became less suited for
fighting savage beasts, on the other hand, it was easier to gather together to
resist them in common.

In this new state, with a simple and
solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to provide
for them, men enjoyed a great deal of leisure time and used it to produce for
their own convenience several types of amenities unknown to their fathers. And
that was the first yoke they unwittingly imposed on themselves and the first
source of the evils they were preparing for their descendants. For, aside from
the fact that in this way they continued to soften their bodies and minds,
these amenities, through habit, lost almost all their charm and, at the same
time, degenerated into real needs. It became much more cruel to lack them than
sweet to possess them, and people were sad to lose them without being happy to
own them.

Here we glimpse a little better how the
use of speech was imperceptibly established or perfected within the bosom of
each family, and it is possible to surmise once more how various particular
causes could extend language and accelerate its progress by making it more
necessary. Massive floods or earthquakes surrounded some inhabited regions with
water or precipices. Revolutions of the earth broke off portions of the continent
and split them up into islands. We can understand that among men brought
together in this way and forced to live together, there must have formed a
common idiom, more so than among those who wandered freely in the forests on
the mainland. Thus, it is very possible that after their first attempts at
navigation, some islanders brought among us the use of speech. And it is at
least highly probable that society and languages originated in the islands and
were perfected there before being known on the mainland.

Everything begins to change how it
looked. Men who have thus far wandered in the woods, once they adopt a more
stable settlement, slowly come together, are united in various bands, and
finally form in each region a particular nation, unified in their customary
traditions and characters, not by regulations and laws, but by the same way of
life and diet and by the common influence of climate. A permanent settlement
cannot fail to eventually create some connections among various families. The
young people of different sexes live in neighboring huts, and the passing
interaction that nature demands soon leads, through time spent in each other’s
company, to another no less sweet and more permanent. People grow accustomed to
considering different objects and to making comparisons. They imperceptibly
acquire ideas of merit and beauty, which produce sentiments of preference. By
dint of seeing one another, they can no longer go without seeing each other
again. A tender and sweet sentiment insinuates itself into the heart, and at
the least opposition turns into an impetuous rage: jealousy awakens with love;
discord triumphs, and the gentlest of passions receives sacrifices of human
blood.

As ideas and sentiments succeed one
another and the mind and heart are drawn out, the human race continues to
become domesticated, relationships expand, and bonds tighten. People became
used to assembling in front of the huts or around a large tree. Singing and
dancing, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the
occupation of idle and congregated men and women. Each began to look at the
others and to want to be looked at, and public esteem was valued. The one who
sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or
the most eloquent became the most highly thought of, and that was the first
step towards inequality and, at the same time, towards vice. From these first
preferences were born, on the one hand, vanity and scorn and, on the other,
shame and envy, and the fermentation brought about by these new leavens
eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.

As soon as men began to appreciate one
another and the idea of respect was formed in their minds, everyone claimed to
have a right to it, and failing to respect someone was no longer possible with
impunity. From that emerged the first duties of civility, even among savages,
and consequently deliberate wrong became an outrage, because, along with the
harm resulting from the injury, the offended party often considered the
contempt for his person more unbearable than the harm itself. And so, because
each man punished the contempt which had been shown to him in a manner
proportional to his own self-esteem, acts of vengeance became terrible, and men
bloody and cruel. This is precisely the stage reached by the majority of savage
peoples known to us. And because several peoples have not sufficiently
distinguished among ideas and observed how distant they already were from the
first state of nature, they have rushed to conclude that man is naturally cruel
and needs civil order to mollify him; whereas nothing is as gentle as he is in
his primitive state, when, placed by nature at equal distances from the
stupidity of beasts and the lethal enlightenment of civil man and equally
limited by instinct and by reason to protecting himself from the harm which
threatens him, he is restrained by natural pity from doing harm to anyone
himself, since nothing inclines him to do so, not even after he has been harmed himself. For, according the axiom of the wise Locke, There can be no injury where there is no
property.(19)

But it is necessary to remark that once
society started and relationships among men were already established, different
qualities were required in them from those that they retained from their
primitive constitution. Morality began to introduce itself into human actions.
Before there were laws, each man was the sole judge and avenger of the offences
he had received, and thus the goodness suitable to the pure state of nature was
no longer appropriate to emerging society. Punishments had to become more
severe as opportunities to offend became more frequent, and the dread of
vengeance had to replace the restraint of laws. Thus, although men had become
less hardy and natural pity had already suffered some change, because this
period in the development of human faculties held a clear middle position
between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour propre, it must have been the
happiest and most durable epoch.The
more we reflect on this, the more we find that this state was
the least subject to revolutions and the best for man (Note 16) and that he must have emerged from
it only through some fatal chance, which for the common utility should never
have happened. The example of savages, almost all of them discovered at this
stage, seems to confirm that the human race was made to remain in it forever,
that this state is the true youth of the world, and that all later progress has
looked like so many steps towards the perfection of the individual but has, in
reality, been towards the decrepitude of the species.

As long as men were content with their
rustic huts, as long as they limited themselves to stitching their clothes of
skin with thorns or fish bones, to adorn themselves with feathers and shells,
to painting their bodies various colors, to perfecting or embellishing their
bows and arrows, to carving some fishing canoes or crude musical instruments
with sharp stones, in a word, as long as they did not occupy themselves except
with tasks which one man could do by himself and to arts which did not require
the collaboration of many hands, they lived free, healthy, good, and happy
lives, as much as their nature enabled them to do so, and they continued to
enjoy among themselves the pleasures of independent interaction. But from the
moment a man had need of another’s help, from the time they noticed that it was
useful for one man alone to have provisions for two, equality disappeared,
property was introduced, work became necessary, and the vast forests were
transformed into smiling fields, which had to be watered with men’s sweat and
in which slavery and misery were soon seen sprouting up and growing along with
the harvest.

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two
arts whose invention produced this great revolution. For the poet, what has
civilized men and ruined the human race is gold and silver; but for the
philosopher it is iron and wheat. Both of these were unknown to the savages of
America, who for that reason have always remained as they are. Other peoples
even seem to have remained barbarous as long as they practiced one of these
arts without the other. And perhaps one of the main reasons why Europe has been
politically ordered, if not earlier, at least more continuously and better than
the other parts of the world, is that it has been, at one and the same time,
the most abundant in iron and the most fertile in wheat.

It is very difficult to conjecture how
men came to know and use iron. For it is not believable that they came up on
their own with the idea of extracting the raw material from the mine and giving
it the necessary preparations for getting it to fuse, before they knew what the
result of that would be. On the other hand, we can attribute this discovery
even less to some accidental fire, since mines are built only in dry places
devoid of trees and plants, so that it appears nature had taken precautions to
conceal this fatal secret from us. So the only thing left is that an
extraordinary event, involving some volcano ejecting metallic materials in
molten form, would have given observers the idea of imitating this natural
operation. Even so, we must assume they had ample courage and foresight to
undertake such a difficult task and to see from a considerable distance the
advantages they could derive from it, something hardly appropriate even to
minds already more trained than theirs must have been.

As for agriculture, its principles were
known long before its practice was established, and it is scarcely possible
that men who were constantly busy taking their subsistence from trees and
plants did not relatively soon get an idea of the ways nature uses to grow
plants. But their industry probably did not turn in this direction until a
great deal later, either because the trees, which, along with hunting and
fishing, provided their food, did not need their care, or because they did not
know how to use wheat or had no tools to cultivate it, or because they lacked
the foresight to think of future needs, or finally because they had no way of
preventing others from taking away the fruits of their labor. Once they became
more industrious, it is plausible that they began using sharp stones and
pointed sticks to cultivate some vegetables or roots around their huts long
before they knew how to prepare wheat and had the tools necessary for
large-scale cultivation, to say nothing of the fact that, in order to devote
oneself to this occupation and seed the earth, one must first resolve to give
up something in order to gain a great deal later on; a way of anticipating
things far removed from the frame of mind of savage man who, as I have said,
has considerable trouble thinking in the morning about his evening needs.

The invention of other arts was thus
necessary to force the human race to apply itself to the art of agriculture. As
soon as men were needed to melt and forge iron, other men were needed to feed
them. The more the number of workers multiplied, the fewer hands were used to
provide their common subsistence, without there being fewer mouths to consume
it. And since some of them had to have foodstuffs in exchange for their iron,
others finally discovered the secret of using iron to increase the production
of food. From that was born, on the one hand, plowing and agriculture and, on
the other, the art of working with metals and multiplying their uses.

From the cultivation of the land
necessarily followed its division, and from property, once it became
recognized, the first rules of justice. For in order to give each man what is
his, it is necessary that each man have something. Furthermore, men began to
direct their gaze into the future and, since all of them saw that they had some
goods to lose, none need fear retaliation against himself for the wrongs he might
do to others. This origin is all the more natural since it is impossible to
conceive of the idea of property emerging from anything other than manual
labor. For it is not clear what a man can add over and above his work in order
to appropriate things he has not made. It is labour alone that gives the farmer
the right to the products of the earth which he has worked on and hence gives
him one to the land, at least until the harvest, and thus from year to year.
Since that constitutes a continuous possession, it is easily transformed into
property. When the ancients, says Grotius, gave Ceres the epithet of
legislatrix and the name Thesmophoria to a festival celebrated in her honor,
they let it be known by this action that the division of the earth produced a new
kind of right, that is, the right of property, different from
the right which results from natural law.(20)

Once in this state, things could have
remained equal, if the talents had been equal, and if, for instance, the use of
iron and the consumption of foodstuffs had always remained in an exact balance.
But the proportion, which nothing maintained, was soon broken. The strongest
man did more of the work. The most skillful was better at turning his work to
his own advantage. The most ingenious found ways to shorten his labor. The
ploughman had a greater need for iron or the blacksmith for wheat, and, while
both worked equally, one earned a great deal while the other had hardly enough
to live. In this way, natural inequality imperceptibly spread, along with that
of social arrangements, and the differences among men, developed by
circumstances, become more perceptible and more permanent in their effects, and
begin to have the same relative influence on the lot of individuals.

Once matters had reached this point, it
is easy to imagine the rest. I will not pause to describe the successive
inventions of the other arts, the progress of languages, the testing and use of
talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use or abuse of riches, or all those
details that follow these and which anyone can easily provide. I will limit
myself merely to casting a glance at the human race situated in this new order
of things.

There we are, then, with all our
faculties developed, memory and imagination in play, amour propre involved, reason activated, and the mind almost at the
limit of perfection. There we have all the natural qualities put into action,
the rank and fate of each man established, not only on the basis of the
quantity of goods and the power of helping or harming, but also on the basis of
the mind, beauty, strength or skill, and merit or talents. Since these
qualities were the only ones that could attract respect, it was soon necessary
to have them or to affect them and, for one’s own advantage, to show oneself as
different from what one really was. Being and appearing became two entirely
different things, and from this distinction emerged imposing pomp, deceitful
cunning, and all their attendant vices. On the other hand, no matter how free
and independent man had been previously, there he was, subjected by a multitude
of new needs, to, as it were, all of nature and above all to his fellow men, to
whom he has, in a sense, become a slave, even in becoming their master. If he
is rich, he needs their services; if poor, he needs their help, and if of
middling means, he is in no position to do without them. Thus, he must
constantly seek to interest them in his lot and to make them discover a real or
apparent profit for themselves in working for his. This makes him deceitful and
artificial with some men, imperious and harsh with others, and requires him to
abuse all those he needs, when he cannot make them afraid of him and does not
find it in his interest to serve them usefully. Finally, devouring ambition,
the keen desire to raise his relative fortune, less from a real need than to
set oneself above others, inspires in all men a dark tendency to inflict
injuries on each other, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because, in
order to strike its blow in greater safety, it often assumes a mask of
goodwill: in a word, competition and rivalry on the one hand, and opposing
interest[s] on the other, and the constant hidden desire to make one’s profit
at the expense of others. All these evils are the first effects of property and
the inseparable attendants of emerging inequality.

Before the signs that represent riches
had been invented, wealth could scarcely have consisted of anything other than
lands and livestock, the only real goods men could possess. But when
inheritances had increased in number and extent to the point of covering the
entire land, all adjoining one another, some could no longer grow except at the
expense of others, and the people left over, whom weakness or indolence had
prevented from acquiring an estate of their own, became poor without having
lost anything, because, with everything changing around them, they alone had
not changed and so were obliged to receive or to steal their subsistence from
the hands of the rich. From that began to emerge, according to the different
characters of one or the other, domination and servitude, or violence and
plunder. The rich, for their part, had hardly learned about the pleasure of
dominating than they soon disdained all others, and, making use of their old
slaves to subject new ones, dreamed only of subjugating and enslaving their
neighbors, like those ravenous wolves which, having once tasted human flesh,
reject all other food and no longer want to devour anything but men.

In this way, when the most powerful or
the most wretched used their strength or their needs to create a kind of right
to the goods of others, equivalent, according to them, to the right of
property, equality was fractured, and the most horrific disorder followed.
Thus, the usurpations of the rich, the thievery of the poor, and everyone’s
frantic passions snuffing out natural pity, and the still-feeble voice of
justice, made men avaricious, ambitious, and wicked. Between the right of the
strongest and the right of the first occupant there arose a perpetual conflict
which ended only in fights and murders (Note 17). The emerging society turned
to the most horrific state of war. The human race, debased and desolate, unable
to retrace its steps or to renounce the unfortunate acquisitions it had made,
and working only for its shame by abusing the faculties which honour it,
brought itself to the verge of its ruin.

It is impossible that men would not
finally have reflected on such a miserable situation and the calamities
devastating them. The rich, above all, must soon have felt how much a perpetual
war worked to their disadvantage, where they alone paid all the costs and
where, though the risk to life was common to all, they alone risked their
property. Moreover, however they might have been able to colour their
usurpations, they knew well enough that they were based only on a precarious
and abusive right and that, since they had been acquired merely by force, force
could take them away from them without their having a reason to complain. Even
those who had been enriched by their industry alone could hardly base their
property on better claims. They could well say, “I am the one who built this
wall. I earned this land through my labor.” “Who laid out its boundaries for
you?” one could reply to them, “And by virtue of what do you claim to be paid
at our expense for labour which we did not impose on you? Do you not know that
a multitude of your brothers are dying or suffering from a need for what you
have in excess, and that you needed the express and unanimous consent of the
human race in order to appropriate for yourself from the common subsistence
everything over and above your own?” Lacking valid reasons to justify himself
and sufficient strength to defend himself, easily crushing an individual, but
himself crushed by gangs of bandits, alone against everyone and, because of
mutual jealousies, unable to join with his equals against an enemy united by a
common hope of pillage, the rich man, pressed by necessity, eventually thought
of the best-conceived project that has ever entered the human mind: to use to his
advantage the very forces of those who were attacking him, to turn his
adversaries into his defenders, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give
them other institutions that were as favorable to him as natural right was
against him.

With this in mind, after showing his
neighbours the horror of a situation which armed them all against the others,
which made their possessions as onerous as their needs, and in which no one
found his security either in poverty or in wealth, he easily came up with
specious reasons to lead them to his goal. “Let us unite,” he said to them, “to
protect the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and to assure to
each man the possession of what belongs to him. Let us set up rules of justice
and peace to which everyone is obliged to conform, which do not exempt any one,
and which in some way redress the whims of fortune, by subjecting the powerful
and the weak equally to mutual obligations. In a word, instead of turning our
forces against ourselves, let us collect them into one supreme power which
governs us according to wise laws and which protects and defends all the
members of the association, repels common enemies, and keeps us in eternal
concord.”

He required much less than the
equivalent of this speech to convince crude and easily seduced men who, in
addition, had too many things to unravel among themselves to be able to go
without arbitrators and too much avarice and ambition to be able to do without
masters for any length of time. They all rushed headlong into their chains,
believing they were ensuring their liberty. For although they had sufficient
reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have
enough experience to foresee its dangers. Those most capable of anticipating
the abuses were precisely the ones who counted on profiting from them, and even
the wise ones saw that they had to resolve to sacrifice a part of their liberty
in order to preserve the rest, as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the
rest of his body.

Such was, or must have been, the origin
of society and of laws, which provided new shackles for the weak and new powers
for the rich (Note 18), irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, secured
forever the law of property and inequality, turned a clever usurpation into an
irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth
subjected all the human race to labor, servitude, and misery. It is easy to see
how the establishment of a single society made the establishment of all the
others indispensable, and how, to stand up against united forces, it was
necessary to unite in turn. Societies multiplied or extended themselves rapidly
and soon covered the entire surface of the earth. It was no longer possible to
find a single corner of the universe where one could free oneself from the yoke
and duck out from under the often badly wielded sword which each man saw
permanently suspended above his head. Since civil law thus became the common
rule for citizens, the law of nature no longer had a place, except among the
various societies, where, under the name of the [law of] nations, it was
tempered with a few tacit conventions to make commerce possible and to take the
place of natural fellow-feeling, which, by losing almost all the power between
one society and another which it used to have between man and man, no longer is
found anywhere, other than in some great cosmopolitan souls, who cross the
imaginary barriers separating peoples and, following the example of the
Sovereign Being who created them, embrace the entire human race in their
benevolence.

Since the political bodies thus
remained in a state of nature among themselves, they soon felt the
disadvantages which had forced individuals to leave it, and this condition
became even more deadly among these large bodies than it had been previously
among the individuals who comprised them. From that emerged national wars,
battles, murders, reprisals that make nature tremble and shock reason, and all
those horrible prejudices that rank the honour of shedding human blood among
the virtues. The most decent people learned to count among their duties that of
butchering their fellow men. Finally, men were seen massacring each other by
the thousands without knowing why. And more murders were committed in a single
day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single town than had been
committed in the state of nature during entire centuries over the whole face of
the earth. Such are the first effects one glimpses of the division of the human
race into different societies. Let us go back to their founding.

I know that several people have
provided other origins for political societies, such as conquests by the most
powerful or the union of the weak. The choice among these causes is irrelevant
to what I want to establish. However, the one I have just laid out seems to me
the most natural for the following reasons: (1) Since in the first case the
right of conquest is not a right, it could not have been the basis for any
other right. The conqueror and the vanquished people constantly remain in a
state of mutual warfare, unless the nation regains its full liberty and
voluntarily chooses its conqueror as its leader. Up to that point, whatever
capitulations have been made, since they were founded on nothing but violence
and consequently are rendered null by that very fact, there cannot be with this
hypothesis either a genuine society or a body politic or any law other than the
law of the strongest. (2) In the second case, these words strong and weak are
ambiguous. In the interval occurring between the establishment of the right of
property or of the first occupant and that of political governments, the
meaning of these terms is better rendered by the words rich and poor, because,
in fact, before there were laws, a man had no way to subjugate his equals other
than by attacking their goods or by giving them a part of his own. (3) Since
the poor had nothing to lose but their liberty, it would have been very foolish
of them to give away voluntarily the only benefit remaining to them without
gaining anything in return. By contrast, since the rich were, so to speak,
sensitive about all aspects of their goods, it was much easier to harm them,
and thus they would take more precautions to protect themselves. Finally, it is
reasonable to believe that something has been invented by those to whom it is
useful rather than by those it harms.

The newly emerging government did not
have a constant and regular form. The lack of philosophy and experience enabled
men to see only the present inconveniences, and they did not think of remedying
others except as they arose. Despite all the work of the wisest lawgivers, the
political state always remained imperfect, because it was almost a work of
chance and because, since it began badly, time revealed its faults and
suggested remedies, but could never repair the defects in the constitution.
People constantly patched it up, whereas what was required was to begin by
clearing the air and rejecting all the old materials, as
Lycurgus did at Sparta, in order to raise a good structure later.(22) At first, society consisted only of
some general conventions that all the individuals committed themselves to
observe and the community pledged itself to guarantee for each of them.
Experience necessarily revealed how weak such a constitution was and how easy
it was for lawbreakers to avoid conviction or punishment for wrongdoing where
the public had to act as sole witness and judge. The law must have been evaded
in a thousand ways, and the inconveniences and disorders must have continually
multiplied, in order for people eventually to think of conferring on
individuals the dangerous trust of public authority, and for them to commit to
magistrates the task of making sure the decisions of the people were observed.
For to say that leaders were chosen before the confederation was created—and
that ministers of the laws existed before the laws themselves—is an assumption
that does not warrant serious rebuttal.

It would be no more reasonable to
believe that people were at first thrown into the arms of an absolute master,
unconditionally and irrevocably, and that that the first way of providing
communal security that proud and untamed men might have imagined was to hurl
themselves into slavery. In fact, why did they give themselves superiors,
unless it was to defend them against oppression and to protect their goods,
their liberties, and their lives, which are, so to speak, the constituent
elements of their being? Now, since in the relationships between man and man
the worst that could happen to one was to see himself at the mercy of the
other, would it not have been against good sense to begin by handing over to a
leader the only things for whose preservation they required his help? What
equivalent could he have offered them for conceding such a fine right? If he
had dared to demand it under the pretext of defending them, would he not have
immediately received the response of the old story: “What more will the enemy
do to us?”It is thus indisputable,
and the fundamental maxim of all political right, that the people gave
themselves leaders to defend their liberty and not to enslave them. “If we have a prince,” said Pliny to Trajan, “it is so that he may
protect us from having a master.”(23)

Political writers produce the same
sophistries about the love of liberty that philosophers have produced about the
state of nature. On the basis of things they see, they judge very different
matters which they have not seen, and they attribute to men a natural
inclination to servitude because of the patience with which the men before
their eyes endure theirs, without thinking that liberty is like innocence and
virtue, whose value one does not feel except to the extent that one enjoys them
oneself, and loses the taste for them as soon as they are lost. “I know the
delights of your country,” said Brasidas to a satrap who was
comparing the life of Sparta with that of Persepolis, “but you cannot know the
pleasures of mine.”(24)

Just as an untamed stallion bristles
his mane, paws the earth with his hoof, and struggles furiously at the very
approach of a bit, while a trained horse patiently endures the whip and the
spur, so barbarous man does not bend his head under the yoke which civilized
man carries without a murmur, and he prefers the most stormy liberty to tranquil
subjugation. Thus, we must not judge the natural dispositions of man for or
against servitude by the degradation of enslaved people, but by the amazing
things all free people have done to protect themselves against oppression. I
know that the former do nothing but boast all the time about the peace and
quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that they
call the most miserable slavery peace, but when I see the latter
sacrificing pleasures, rest, riches, power, and life itself to the preservation
of the only good so disdained by those who have lost it, when I see animals
born free and abhorring captivity smashing their heads against the bars of
their prison, when I see multitudes of totally naked savages scorning European
pleasures and enduring hunger, fire, sword, and death simply to
preserve their independence, I feel that it is not appropriate for slaves to
reason about freedom.(25)

As for paternal authority, from which
several people have derived absolute government and all of society, it is
enough, without going back over the proofs to the contrary by Locke and Sidney,
to observe that nothing in the world is further removed from the ferocious
spirit of despotism than the gentleness of this authority, which considers more
the advantage of the one who obeys than the benefit to the one who commands. By
the law of nature the father is the master of the child only for as long as the
father’s help is necessary to him, and once beyond this term, they become
equals. At that point the son, perfectly independent of his father, owes him
only respect and not obedience. For gratitude is clearly a duty which should be
done, but not a right that can be demanded. Instead of saying that civil
society stems from paternal power, we should say the reverse, that this power draws
its main strength from society: an individual was not recognized as the father
of several children until they remained gathered around him. The father’s
goods, of which he is truly the master, are the bonds which keep his children
dependent on him, and he has the power to give them as a portion of his estate
only as much as they have deserved from him by constant deference to his
wishes. Now the subjects, far from having a similar favour to look forward to
from their despot, given that they belong to him personally, both they and all
they possess, or at least that is what he claims, are reduced to receiving as a
favour what he leaves them of their own goods. He carries out justice when he
robs them and shows them mercy when he lets them live.

Continuing to examine in this manner
the facts in relation to Right, we would find no more solidity than truth in
the voluntary establishment of a tyranny. It would be difficult to show the
validity of a contract which would be binding on only one of the parties, in which
everything would be placed on one side and nothing on the other, and which
would turn out to the disadvantage only of the man who commits himself to it.
Even today this odious system is very far from being that of wise and good
monarchs, and above all of the kings of France, as we can see in various parts
of their edicts and especially in the following passage from a famous edict
published in 1667, in the name and by the orders of Louis XIV: “Let no one say,
therefore, that the sovereign is not subject to the laws of his state, since
the contrary proposition is a truth of the law of nations, which flattery has
sometimes attacked, but which good princes have always defended as a tutelary
divinity of their states. How much more legitimate is it to say with the wise
Plato that the perfect happiness of a kingdom is that a prince is obeyed by his
subjects, that the prince obeys the law, and that the law is right and always
aims at the public good.” I shall not stop to explore whether, since liberty is
the most noble of man’s faculties, it is not degrading his nature, putting him
on the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, and offending even the Author of
his being to renounce unreservedly the most precious of all His gifts, and to
subject himself to committing all the crimes which He has forbidden us, in
order to please a ferocious or insane master, and whether this Sublime
Craftsman should be more angry to see his most beautiful work destroyed than to
see him dishonored. [I will overlook, if you wish, the authority of Barbeyrac,
who states clearly, following Locke, that no one can sell his liberty to the
extent of submitting himself to an arbitrary power which treats
him as it pleases: “For,” he adds, “that would be selling his own life of which
he not the master.”](26)
I will only ask by what right those who have not been afraid to debase
themselves to this point could have subjected their posterity to the same
ignominy, and renounced on its behalf goods which do not depend on their
generosity and without which life itself is onerous to all those worthy of it?

Pufendorf says that just as one
transfers one’s possessions to someone else by conventions and contracts, so
one can also divest oneself of one’s liberty in favour of someone else. That,
it seems to me, is extremely poor reasoning. For, first of all, the goods that
I alienate become something totally foreign to me, and their abuse leaves me
indifferent. But it is important to me that someone does not abuse my liberty,
and I cannot, without making myself guilty of the evil that I will be forced to
do, risk becoming the instrument of crime. Furthermore, given that the right of
property is only a convention and a human institution, any man can dispose of
what he possesses as he wishes. But it is not the same with the essential gifts
of nature, such as life and freedom.Each
man is permitted to enjoy these, and it is at least doubtful that he has the
right to strip himself of them. In giving up one, he degrades his being; in
giving up the other, he destroys his being as much as he can. And since no
temporal good can compensate for one or the other, it would offend nature and
reason at the same time to renounce them no matter what the price. But even if
a man could alienate his freedom just as he can his possessions, it would be
very different for children, who enjoy their father’s goods only by
transmission of his right; whereas, liberty is a gift which they hold from
nature in their capacity as human beings, and so their parents had no right to
deprive them of it. Hence, just as it was necessary to treat nature with
violence in order to establish slavery, so it was necessary to change nature to
perpetuate this right. And the jurists who have solemnly pronounced that the
child of a slave would be born a slave have decided in different terms that a
human being would not be born a human being.

Thus, it appears certain to me not only
that governments did not begin through arbitrary power, which is only their
corruption and extreme limit and which leads them back finally to the single
law of the strongest, for which they were initially the remedy, but also that,
even if this is the way they did begin, such power, being by nature
illegitimate, could not have served as the foundation for the rights of society
and thus for institutional inequality.

Without entering today into
investigations which still remain to be made on the nature of the fundamental
pact of all governments, I am following common opinion and limiting myself to
considering here the establishment of the body politic as a genuine contract
between the people and the leaders it chooses for itself, a contract through
which the two parties obligate themselves to observe laws that are stipulated
in it and that form the bonds of their union. Since the people have, so far as
social relations are concerned, united all their wills into a single will, all
the articles on which this will is explicitly clear become as many fundamental
laws which obligate all members of the state without exception. One of these
laws regulates the selection and power of the magistrates charged with
supervising the execution of the others. This power extends to everything that
can maintain the constitution, without going to the point of changing it. To
this are added honours that make the laws and their ministers worthy of
respect, and for the latter some personal prerogatives which compensate them
for the tiresome work a good administration demands. The magistrate, for his
part, commits himself to use the power entrusted to him only according to the
intention of the constituents, in order to keep each man in the peaceful
enjoyment of what belongs to him and to prefer at all times the public utility
to his own interest.

Before experience had demonstrated or
knowledge of the human heart had enabled men to anticipate the inevitable
abuses of such a constitution, it must have appeared all the better because
those who were charged with making sure it was preserved were themselves the
most interested in doing so. For, given that the magistracy and its rights were
established only on fundamental laws, as soon as the laws were destroyed, the
magistrates would cease to be legitimate, and the people would no longer be
bound to obey them. Since it was not the magistrate but the law that
constituted the essence of the state, each man would by right return to his
natural freedom.

The slightest attentive reflection
would confirm this with new reasons, and by the nature of the contract one
would see that it could not be irrevocable. For if there were no superior power
which could guarantee the fidelity of the contracting parties or force them to
fulfill their reciprocal commitments, the parties would remain sole judges in
their own cause, and each of them would always have the right to renounce the
contract, as soon as it found that the other was contravening the conditions,
or those conditions ceased to suit it. It appears that the right to abdicate
could be founded on this principle. Now, to consider, as we are doing, only the
human institution: if the magistrate who has all the power in his hands and who
appropriates all the advantages of the contract for himself, nevertheless had
the right to renounce his authority, then there is an even stronger reason why
the people, who pay for all the faults of their leaders, should have a right to
renounce their dependence. But the horrific dissentions and the innumerable
disorders which this dangerous power would necessarily bring with it show more
than anything else how much human governments needed a more substantial basis
than reason alone, and how much it was necessary to the public peace that
Divine Will intervened to give sovereign authority a sacred and inviolable
character which removes from the subjects the fatal right of disposing of it.
If religion had achieved only this benefit for men, that would be enough to
require them to cherish and adopt it, even with its abuses, because it spares
even more blood than fanaticism causes to run. But let us follow the thread of
our hypothesis.

The various forms of governments stem
from the greater or lesser differences that existed among the individuals at
the moment of their institution. Was one man eminent in power, virtue, riches,
or esteem? He was elected the only magistrate, and the state became a monarchy.
If several men, more or less equal among themselves, prevailed over all the
others, they were elected as a group, and an aristocracy was born. Those whose
fortune or talents were less disproportionate and who were the least removed
from the state of nature kept the supreme administration communal and formed a
democracy. Time confirmed which of these forms was the most advantageous for
men. Some remained subjected solely to the laws; others soon obeyed masters.
Citizens wanted to keep their freedom; subjects thought of nothing but taking
away that of their neighbors, since they could not bear that others were
enjoying a benefit that they no longer enjoyed themselves. In a word, on one
side were riches and conquests, on the other happiness and virtue.

In these various governments, all the
magistrates were at first elected, and if wealth did not win out, preference
was given to merit, which confers a natural pre-eminence, and to age, which
provides experience in business and composure in deliberations. The Hebrew
elders, the Gerontes in Sparta, the Senate in Rome, and even
the etymology of our word Seigneur
show how much old age was respected in earlier times.(27) The more the elections fell to men of
advanced age, the more frequent these became, and the more problems made themselves
felt. Intrigues were introduced, factions formed, parties grew embittered,
civil wars broke out, finally the blood of citizens was sacrificed for the
alleged happiness of the state, and people were on the verge of falling back
into the anarchy of earlier times. The ambition of the leading men took
advantage of these circumstances in order to perpetuate within their families
their official positions. The people, already accustomed to dependence, repose,
and the conveniences of life, and already beyond the state where they could
break their chains, agreed to allow their servitude to increase in order to
consolidate their tranquility.That
is how the leaders became hereditary and grew accustomed to looking on their
magistrate’s office as a family possession, to considering themselves the
proprietors of the state, in which at first they had been only officials, to
call their fellow citizens their slaves, to counting them like livestock among
the many things that belonged to them, and to calling themselves the equals of
the gods and kings of kings.

If we follow the progress of inequality
in these different revolutions, we will find that the establishment of law and
the right of property was its first stage, the institution of the magistracy
was the second, and the third and last was the transformation of legitimate
power into arbitrary power, so that the condition of rich and poor was
authorized by the first age, that of the powerful and the weak by the second,
and that of master and slave by the third, which is the final degree of
inequality and the limit to which all the others eventually lead, until new
revolutions dissolve the government entirely or move it closer to a legitimate
institution.

To understand the necessity of this
progress we must consider, not so much the motives for the establishment of the
body politic, as the form it takes in execution and the disadvantages it brings
with it. For the vices that make social institutions necessary are the same
that make their abuse inevitable. And since, with the sole exception of Sparta,
where the law watched principally over the education of the children and where
Lycurgus established moral traditions that almost did away with the need to add
laws, laws in general are not as strong as the passions and keep men in check
without changing them; it would be easy to prove that any government which,
without being corrupted or altered, always worked exactly according to the
purpose for which it had been established would have been instituted
unnecessarily, and that a country where no one evaded the laws and abused the
magistracy would need neither magistrates nor laws.

Political distinctions necessarily lead
to civil distinctions. The growing inequality between the people and its
leaders soon makes itself felt among individuals, and is modified in them in a
thousand ways according to passions, talents, and events. The magistrate could
not usurp illegitimate power without creating some hangers-on to whom he is
forced to cede part of it. Moreover, since citizens do not let themselves be
oppressed except to the extent that they are led by blind ambition, and since
they look more below than above them, domination becomes dearer to them than
independence, and they consent to carry chains in order to be able to give them
out in their turn. It is very difficult to reduce to obedience someone who does
not seek to command, and the most adroit politician would not succeed in
subjecting men who wished only to be free. But inequality spreads without
difficulty among ambitious and cowardly souls, always ready to run the risks of
fortune and to dominate or serve almost indifferently, according to whether it
is favorable or unfavorable to them. That is why there had to come a time when
the eyes of the people were so spellbound that their leaders only had to say to
the most insignificant of men, “Be great, you and all your people,” and
immediately he appeared great to everyone, as well as in his own eyes, and his
descendants were raised even more, in proportion to their distance from him.
The more remote and uncertain the cause, the more the effect grew. The more
loafers one could count in a family, the more illustrious it became.

If this were here the place to go into
details, I would easily explain how inequality in credit and authority becomes
inevitable among individuals even without the government getting involved]
(Note 19) as soon as they are united in the same society and thus are forced to
make comparisons among themselves and to take into account the differences they
find in the continual use they must make of one another. These differences are
of several kinds but, in general, since riches, nobility or rank, power, and
personal merit are the principal distinctions by which people are measured in
society, I would prove that the cooperation or the conflict of these various
forces is the most certain indication of whether a state is well or badly
constituted. I would show that among these four types of inequality, since
personal qualities are the origin of all the others, wealth is the last to
which they are finally reduced, because, given that it is the most immediately
useful for one’s well being and the easiest to pass on, men readily make use of
it to buy all the rest. This observation enables us to judge with sufficient precision
the extent to which each people is removed from its original institution and
how far it has gone along the road to the utmost stage of corruption. I would
point out how much this universal desire for reputation, honors, and
preferment, which devours us all, trains and compares talents and strengths,
how much it excites and multiplies the passions, and, by turning all men into
competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, and making so many contestants run the
same course, how much it causes setbacks, successes, and catastrophes of all
kinds every day. I would show that it is to this passionate desire to have
oneself talked about, to this frantic urge to distinguish ourselves, which
keeps us almost always outside ourselves, that we owe what is best and worst
among men, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our mistakes, our
conquerors and our philosophers, that is, a multitude of bad things compared to
a small number of good ones. Finally, I would prove that if one sees a handful
of powerful and rich men at the peak of their greatness and fortune, while the
crowd grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former value the
things they enjoy only to the extent that the latter are deprived of them, and
because, without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy if the
people ceased to be wretched.

But these details alone would be
material for a considerable work in which one weighed the advantages and the
disadvantages of all governments relative to the rights of the state of nature,
and where one would reveal all the different faces behind which inequality has
shown itself up to the present time and will be able to show itself in future
ages, depending on the nature of those governments and on the revolutions which
time will necessarily bring about in them. We would see the multitude oppressed
from within as a result of the very precautions that it had taken against what
threatened it from outside. We would see oppression constantly growing without
the oppressed ever being able to know what limits it would have or what
legitimate means they had left to stop it. We would see the rights of citizens
and national liberties gradually extinguished, and the objections of the weak
treated as seditious murmurs. We would see politics restrict the honour of
defending the common cause to a mercenary section of the people. From that we
would see emerge the need for taxes, the discouraged farmer leaving his field,
even during peacetime, and abandoning the plough to gird on a sword. We would
see deadly and bizarre rules arise about points of honor. We would see the
defenders of the homeland sooner or later become its enemies, constantly
holding a raised dagger over their fellow citizens, and there would come a time
when we would hear them saying to the oppressor of their country: “If you order
me to thrust a sword into my brother’s chest or into my father’s throat or into the womb of my pregnant wife, I will do all that, even
though my right hand is unwilling.”(28)

From the extreme inequality in
conditions and fortunes, from the diversity of passions and talents, from
useless arts, from pernicious arts, and from frivolous sciences would emerge
mobs of prejudices, equally contrary to reason, happiness, and virtue. We would
see the leaders fomenting everything that could weaken gathered men by
disuniting them, everything that could give society an air of apparent harmony
while sowing in it seeds of real division, everything that can inspire in the
different orders a mutual distrust and hatred, by setting their rights and
interests against each other and thus reinforcing the power that contains them
all.

It is from the core of this disorder
and of these revolutions that despotism, lifting by degrees its hideous head
and devouring everything it had perceived as good and healthy in all sections
of the state, would finally succeed in trampling over the laws and the people,
and establishing itself on the ruins of the republic. The times preceding this
last change would be periods of troubles and calamities, but by the end
everything would be swallowed up by the monster, and peoples would no longer
have leaders and laws, but only tyrants. From this instant, it would also cease
to be a question of morals and virtue, for wherever despotism
reigns, in which there is no hope from
honesty,it suffers no other
master.(29) As soon as it
speaks, one can consult neither probity nor duty, and the blindest obedience is
the only virtue that remains for slaves.

This is the final stage of inequality
and the extreme point that closes the circle and touches the point where we
began. Here all individuals become equal again because they are nothing, and
since the subjects no longer have any law other than the will of the master,
and the master has no rule other than his passions, the notions of good and the
principles of justice vanish once more. Here everything is reduced to the
single law of the strongest and, as a result, to a new state of nature,
different from the one with which we began, for the first one was the state of
nature in its purity, and this last one is the fruit of an excess of
corruption. In other respects, there is so little difference between these two
states and the contract with the government is so dissolved by despotism, that
the despot is master only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can
be expelled, he has no basis for protesting the violence. The uprising that
ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is an act as lawful as those by
which, the previous day, he disposed of the lives and the goods of his
subjects. Force alone preserved him, and force alone overturns him. Thus,
everything occurs according to natural order, and whatever the outcome of these
short and frequent revolutions may be, no one can complain of injustice from
anyone, but only of his own imprudence or misfortune.

In this way, by discovering and
following the forgotten and lost routes that must have led man from the natural
state to the civil state, and by re-establishing, along with the intermediate
stages which I have just noted, those which the pressures of time have made me
suppress or which my imagination has not suggested to me, every attentive
reader cannot but be struck by the immense gap which separates these two
conditions. In this slow succession of things he will see the solution to an
infinite number of problems of morality and politics that philosophers cannot
resolve. He will appreciate that since the human race of one age is not the
human race of another age, the reason Diogenes did not find a man is that he
was searching among his contemporaries for a man from an age that no longer
existed. Cato, he will say, perished with Rome and liberty, because he was out
of place in his century, and the greatest of men merely
astonished the world he would have governed five hundred years earlier.(30) In a word, he will explain how the
human soul and passions, by imperceptibly altering, change their nature, as it
were; why our needs and our pleasures change their objects over a long period
of time; and why, as the original man disappears by degrees, society no longer
offers to the eyes of a wise man anything other than an assembly of artificial
men and factitious passions, which are the work of all these new relationships
and have no true basis in nature. What reflection teaches us in this matter,
observation confirms perfectly: savage man and civilized man are so different
in the depths of their hearts and in their inclinations that what constitutes
supreme happiness for one would reduce the other to despair. The former
breathes nothing but repose and liberty; he wishes only to live and remain
idle. Even the ataraxia of
the Stoic does not come close to his profound indifference for all other
objects.(31)By contrast, the always-active citizen sweats,
gets agitated, and frets all the time about finding even more laborious
occupations. He works himself to death; he even runs towards it in order to put
himself in a position to live, or he renounces his life to acquire immortality.
He courts the great, whom he hates, and the wealthy, whom he despises. He
spares nothing to obtain the honour of serving them. He boasts proudly of his
low position and of their protection and, proud of his slavery, speaks with
disdain of those who do not have the honour of sharing it. What a spectacle the
wearisome and envied labours of a European minister would be for a native of
the Caribbean! How many cruel deaths would this indolent savage not prefer to
the horror of such a life, which often is not even mitigated by the pleasure of
doing good? But to understand the purpose of so many cares, the words power and reputation would have to have a meaning in his mind. He would have
to learn that there is a type of man who counts the assessment of the rest of
the universe as something and who knows how to be happy and content with
himself on the basis of what other people say rather than on his own testimony.
Such is, in fact, the real cause of all these differences: the savage lives in
himself; social man, always outside himself, cannot live except in the opinion
of others, and it is, so to speak, only from their judgment that he derives the
feeling of his own existence. It is not part of my subject to show how from
such a disposition emerges such a great indifference to good and evil, together
with such pretty discourses on morality; how, with everything reducing itself
to appearances, it all becomes artificial and for show—honor, friendship,
virtue and often even vices, which we finally discover the secret of boasting
about; how, in a word, by always asking others what we are and never daring to
ask ourselves that question, in the middle of so much philosophy, humanity,
politeness, and sublime maxims, we have only a deceptive and frivolous
exterior, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without
happiness. It is sufficient for me to have proved that this is not man’s
original state and that it is only the spirit of society and the inequality it
engenders that change and transform in this way all our natural inclinations.

I have tried to set out the origin and
progress of inequality, the establishment and the abuse of political societies,
as much as these matters can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of
reason alone and independently of sacred dogmas that give to sovereign
authority the sanction of divine right. It follows from this account that
inequality, almost non-existent in a state of nature, derives its strength and
growth from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human
mind, and finally becomes stable and legitimate through the establishment of
property and laws. It follows further that moral inequality, authorized only by
positive right, is contrary to natural right, whenever it is not in exact
proportion with physical inequality, a distinction which demonstrates
sufficiently what we should think in this regard of the type of inequality
which prevails among all civilized peoples, since it is manifestly against the
law of nature, no matter how that is defined, for a child to give orders to an
old man, for an imbecile to lead a wise man, and for a handful of men to stuff
themselves with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.

Rousseau’s Notes

(1) Herodotus
relates that after the murder of the false Smerdis, when the seven liberators
of Persia gathered to discuss the form of government they would give the state,
Otanes was strongly in favour of a republic. This opinion was all the more
extraordinary from the mouth of a satrap, since, in addition to the claim which
he could make to the empire, the great fear more than death a form of
government which requires them to respect men. Otanes, as we can well imagine,
was not listened to and, seeing that they were going to proceed to the election
of a monarch, and not wishing to obey or to command, he willingly gave up his
right to the crown to the other claimants, requesting as his total compensation
that he and his posterity be free and independent. The others granted him this
condition. If Herodotus had not told us of the restriction which was set on
this privilege, it would be necessary to assume it. Otherwise, Otanes, not
recognizing any sort of law and accountable to no one, would have been
all-powerful in the state and stronger even than the king. But there was hardly
any indication that a man who could remain content with such a privilege in a
case like this was capable of abusing it. In fact, it seems that this right
never caused the least trouble in the kingdom, either on the part of the wise
Otanes or of any of his descendants. [Back to Text]

(2) From the very
beginning I have been relying with confidence on one of those authorities
respected by philosophers because they are the product of firm and sublime
reasoning, which only philosophers understand how to find and appreciate:
“Whatever interest we have in knowing ourselves, I do not know whether we do
not have a better understanding of everything that is not us. Provided by
nature with organs uniquely intended for our preservation, we use them only to
take in exterior impressions; we seek only to spread ourselves without, and to
exist outside ourselves. Too busy multiplying the functions of our senses and
increasing the exterior range of our being, we rarely make use of that interior
sense that reduces us to our true dimensions and separates us from everything
that is not in us. However, if we wish to know ourselves, this is the sense we
need to employ, the only one with which we are able to judge ourselves. But how
do we activate this sense to its full extent? How do we free our soul, in which
it resides, of all the illusions of our mind? We have lost the habit of using
it. It has lived without exercise in the middle of the tumult of our corporeal
sensations; it has been desiccated by the fire
of our passions. The heart, the mind, the senses—they have all
worked against it.” Buffon, Histoire
Naturelle. Vol. 4, p. 151, De la
Nature de l’homme.(32)[Back to Text]

(3) The changes
which a long practice of moving on two feet could have produced in the
structure of man, the relationships we still observe between his arms and the
anterior limbs of quadrupeds, and the conclusion derived from their way of
moving could have given rise to doubts about the way of walking that must have
been most natural for us. All children begin by moving on four limbs and
require our example and lessons from us to learn to stand upright. There are
even some savage nations, like the Hottentots, who are very negligent with
their children and leave them to move along on their hands for such a long time
that later they have considerable difficulty getting them to stand straight.
The children of the Caribbean peoples in the Antilles do the same. There are
various examples of human quadrupeds. Among others I could cite that of the
child who was found in 1344 near Hesse, where he had been raised by wolves, and
who used to say later at the court of Prince Henry that, if it had been up to
him alone, he would have preferred to return among them rather than live among
men. He had acquired the habit of moving like these animals to such an extent
that it was necessary to attach pieces of wood to him that forced him to stand
upright and balanced on his two feet. It was the same with the child found in
1694 in the forests of Lithuania, who lived among bears. He did not show, says
M. de Condillac, any trace of reason, moved on his hands and feet, had no
language, and made sounds quite unlike anything made by man. The little savage
of Hanover, who was taken several years ago to the English court, had all the
difficulty in the world forcing himself to walk on two feet. And in 1719 two
other savages were found in the Pyrenees, who ran through the mountains like
quadrupeds. With respect to the objection one could make that this deprives us
of the use of our hands, from which we derive so many advantages, and apart
from the fact that the example of monkeys demonstrates that the hands can be
used very effectively in both ways, that would prove nothing except that man
can give his limbs a more convenient purpose than their natural use, and not
that nature intended man to move differently from what she teaches him to do.

But there are, it seems to me, much
better reasons to put forward in order to assert that man is a biped. First of
all, even if it were shown that at first he could have been structured
differently from the way we see him and nonetheless could eventually become
what he is, this would not be sufficient to conclude that that is what
happened. For, after establishing the possibility of these changes, one would
still have to demonstrate, before accepting them, that they were at least
probable. In addition, the fact that the arms of a man appear to have been able
to serve him as legs when necessary is the only observation in support of this
system, in the face of a large number of others which oppose it. The main ones
are as follows: if he moved on four feet, the way in which the human head is
attached to the body, instead of directing his gaze horizontally, as in all the
other animals and as it does in him when he moves upright, would have kept his
eyes fixed directly on the ground, a position not very favorable for the
preservation of the individual; the tail, which he lacks and does not need when
moving on two feet, is useful for quadrupeds, and none of them is without one;
a woman’s breast is very well placed for a biped who is holding her child in
her arms but is so inconveniently situated for a quadruped that none of them
has it positioned in this way; since the hindquarters are of an excessive
height in proportion to the front limbs—which causes us when moving on all fours
to crawl on our knees—the whole arrangement would have created a poorly
proportioned animal that could not move easily; if he had set his feet as well
as his hands down flat, he would have had in the posterior limb one less joint
than the other animals, that is, the one which joins the cannon bone to the
tibia, and by placing only the tip of his foot on the ground, as he would have
undoubtedly been forced to do, the tarsus, not to mention the many bones which
make it up, would appear too large to replace the cannon, and its articulations
with the metatarsus and the tibia would be too compressed to give the human leg
in this position the same flexibility as the legs of quadrupeds. The example of
children taken at an age when natural forces have not yet developed and the
limbs have not yet grown strong proves nothing at all. I could just as well
claim that dogs are not intended to walk because they do nothing but crawl for
some weeks after their birth. In addition, discrete facts have little force
against the universal practice of all men, even of nations which, having had no
communication with others, have not been able to imitate them in anything. A
child abandoned in a forest before being able to walk and raised by some beast
will have followed the example of his nurse by practicing how to walk like her.
Habit could have given him abilities that he did not have naturally, and just
as people lacking arms succeed by dint of practice in doing with their feet
everything we do with our hands, he will eventually manage to use his hands as
feet. [Back to Text]

(4) If among my
readers there is a scientist incompetent enough to make difficulties for me
concerning this assumption that the earth is naturally fertile, I am going to
answer him with the following passage:

“Since for their nourishment plants
take much more material from air and water than they take from the earth, what
happens when they rot is that they return to the earth more than they have
drawn from it. Moreover, a forest retains rainwater by preventing evaporating.
Thus, in a forest that has been preserved for a long time without being
touched, the layer of earth that provides vegetation would increase
considerably. But animals return less to the earth than they take from it, and,
since men consume enormous amounts of wood and plants for fire and other uses,
it follows that the layer of soil that produces vegetation in an inhabited land
must always grow smaller and finally become like the terrain of Arabia Petraea
and so many other provinces in the East, which is, in fact, the area with the
most ancient habitations, where one finds only salt and sand. For the fixed salt of plants and animals remains,
while all the other parts vaporize.” M. de Buffon, Histoire naturelle.

To this we can add the factual evidence
of the number of trees and plants of every species which fill almost all the
deserted islands discovered in these last centuries, as well as what history
teaches us about the immense forests which had to be felled all over the earth
as it was populated or civilized. On this point I will make three more
observations, as follows: First, if there is a sort of plant that could make up
for the loss of vegetative material brought about, according to the reasoning
of M. de Buffon, by animals, that is, more than anything, the forests of trees,
whose tops and leaves gather and absorb more water and vapour than do the other
plants; second, the destruction of the soil, that is to say, the loss of
material suitable for vegetation, must accelerate proportionately the more the earth
is cultivated and as the more industrious inhabitants consume its productions
of every kind in greater amounts; my third and most important comment is that
the fruits of trees provide animals with more abundant nourishment than other
vegetation can, an experiment I made myself by comparing the production of two
parcels of land equal in size and quality, one covered with chestnut trees and
the other sown with wheat. [Back to Text]

(5) Among
quadrupeds, the two most universal distinguishing features of the carnivorous
species are derived first, from the shape of the teeth, and second, from the
structure of the intestines. The animals that live only on plants all have flat
teeth, like the horse, the ox, the sheep, and the hare, but carnivorous animals
have pointed teeth, like the cat, the dog, the wolf, and the fox. As for the
intestines, the frugivorous animals have some, like the colon, not found in
carnivorous animals. It seems, therefore, that man, who has teeth and
intestines like those in frugivorous animals, should naturally have been placed
in this class. Not only do anatomical observations confirm this opinion, but
the records of antiquity also strongly favour it. “Dicaearchus,” states St.
Jerome, “reports in his books of Greek antiquities that under the reign of
Saturn, when the earth was still fertile on its own, no man ate meat; instead they all lived on fruits and vegetables which grew
naturally” (Book 2, Adversus Jovinianum).
[This view can also be supported by what several modern travelers have
reported. Francois Coreal, among others, states that most of the inhabitants of
the Lucayes taken by the Spaniards to the islands of Cuba, Santo Domingo, and
elsewhere, died from eating flesh.] One can see from this that I am overlooking
a number of helpful points that I could put to good use. For since prey is
almost the only thing carnivorous animals fight about and since the frugivores
live with each other in continual peace, if the human species was in the latter
category, it clearly would have found it a great deal easier to survive in the
state of nature and have had much less need and far fewer occasions to leave
it. [Back
to Text]

(6) All knowledge
that requires reflection, all knowledge acquired only by linking ideas and
perfected only in stages, seems to be completely beyond the grasp of savage
man, for lack of communication with his fellows, that is to say, for lack of
the tool used for this communication and of the needs that make it necessary.
His knowledge and industry are limited to jumping, running, fighting, throwing stones,
and climbing trees. But if these are the only things he knows, he makes up for
it by knowing them much better than we do, who do not have the same need for
them as he does. And since these activities depend entirely on physical
exercise and cannot be communicated or improved from one individual to another,
the first man could have been just as skilled at them as his last descendants.

The accounts of travellers are full of
examples of the strength and the vigour of men among barbarous and savage nations,
and the praise they give to their dexterity and agility is scarcely less. Since
the only things people need to observe these things are eyes, nothing prevents
us from accepting in good faith what visual witnesses affirm in this matter. I
draw some examples of this at random from the first books at hand.

“The Hottentots,” says Kolben, “have a
better understanding of fishing than do the Europeans of the Cape. They are
equally adept with nets, hooks, and spears, in bays as well as in rivers. They
catch fish in their hands with no less ease. Their skill in swimming is
incomparable. The way they swim is surprising and entirely unique to them. They
swim with their bodies upright and their hands stretched out of the water, so
that they look as if they are walking on land. When the sea is extremely rough
and the waves are shaped like so many mountains, they somehow dance on the back
of the waves, rising and falling like pieces of cork.”

“The Hottentots,” the same author
continues, “are surprisingly skillful at hunting, and the nimbleness of their
running is beyond imagination.” He is surprised that they do not put their
agility to bad use more often, although that does happen with them sometimes,
as we can judge from the example he gives: “A Dutch sailor disembarking at the
Cape,” he says, “asked a Hottentot to follow him to town with a roll of tobacco
weighing about twenty pounds. When the two of them were some distance from the
group, the Hottentot asked the sailor if he knew how to run. ‘Run!’ replied the
Dutchman, ‘yes, really well.’ ‘Let’s see,’ replied the African, and racing off
with the tobacco he disappeared almost immediately. The sailor, amazed at his
astonishing speed, did not think of chasing after him and never saw his tobacco
or his porter again.

“They have such acute vision and such a
sure hand that Europeans do not even come close to them. In throwing stones,
they will hit a target the size of a halfpenny from a hundred paces, and what
is more astonishing is that instead of fixing their eyes on the target, the way
we do, they move around making constant contortions. Their
stone seems to be carried by an invisible hand.”(33)

In discussing the savages of the
Antilles, Father du Tertre says almost the same thing we have just read on the
Hottentots from the Cape of Good Hope. He praises above all their accuracy with
arrows in shooting birds in flight and swimming fish, which they then catch by
diving. The savages of North America are no less celebrated for their strength and skill. Here is an example that will enable us to judge these
attributes in the Indians of South America.(34)

In the year 1746, an Indian from Buenos
Aires was condemned to the galleys in Cadiz. He proposed to the governor that
he repurchase his freedom by risking his life in a public festival. He promised
that he would attack the most ferocious bull all by himself without any weapon
in his hand other than a rope, that he would wrestle it to the ground, seize it
with his rope by whatever part people pointed to, saddle it, put a bridle on
it, mount it, and then, riding on that bull, would fight against two more of
the fiercest bulls which they let out of the torillo, and that he would kill them all one after the other the
instant he was ordered to, without anyone’s help. His offer was accepted. The
Indian kept his word and succeeded in everything he had promised. For
information on the way he did that and on all the details of the fight, one can
consult the first volume of Observations
sur l’histoire naturelle by M. Gautier, page 262, from which these facts
are taken. [Back
to Text]

(7) “The length of
life of horses,” says M. de Buffon, “is, as in every other species of animals,
proportional to the length of time they spend growing. Man takes fourteen years
to grow and can live six or seven times as long, that is, ninety or one hundred
years; the horse completes its growth in four years and can live six or seven
times as long, that is, twenty-five or thirty years. The examples that could go
against this rule are so rare that we should not even look upon them as
exceptions from which we can draw conclusions. And just as big horses finish
growing in less time than delicate ones, so they do not live as long and are
old at the age of fifteen years.” [Back to Text]

(8) I believe I see
another difference between carnivorous and frugivorous animals, something even
more general than the one I mentioned in Note 5, since this one includes birds.
This difference consists in the number of the young, which never exceeds two in
each litter for the species which live only on plants and which is usually
greater than this number for carnivorous animals. It is easy to recognize
nature’s purpose in this matter by the number of teats, which is only two in
each female of the first group, like the mare, cow, goat, doe, ewe, and so on,
and is always six or eight in the other females, like the bitch, cat, wolf,
tigress, and so on. The hen, goose, and duck, which are all carnivorous birds,
as well as the eagle, sparrow-hawk, and owl, also lay and hatch a large number
of eggs, something which never happens with the pigeon, turtle dove, or birds,
which eat absolutely nothing but grain. These rarely lay and hatch more than
two eggs at a time. The reason we can give for this difference is that the
animals which live only on grasses and plants spend almost the entire day
feeding and are forced to spend a long time nourishing themselves; thus, they
would not be capable of suckling several young. By contrast, the carnivorous
animals eat their meals almost instantaneously and so can more easily and more
frequently return to their young and to the hunt and make up for the loss of
such a large quantity of milk. There would be many particular observations and
reflections to make about all these matters, but this is not the place for
them, and it is sufficient for me to have shown in this section the most
general system of nature, a system that provides a new reason for taking man
out of the class of carnivorous animals and setting him among the frugivorous
species. [Back
to Text]

(9) A famous author,
weighing the good and bad things of human life and comparing the two amounts,
has found that the latter far surpassed the former and that, all things
considered, life was a rather poor gift for man. His conclusion does not
surprise me: he drew all his arguments from the constitution of civil man. If
he had gone back to natural man, we can imagine he would have come up with very
different results: he would have noticed that man has hardly any ills other
than those he has given himself and that nature would have been exonerated. It is
not without effort that we have succeeded in making ourselves so unhappy. When,
on the one hand, we consider the immense labours of men, so many sciences given
depth, so many arts invented, so many forces used, chasms filled in, mountains
flattened, rocks smashed, rivers made navigable, lands opened up, lakes
excavated, marshes drained, enormous buildings erected on the earth, the sea
covered with ships and sailors, and then, on the other, we investigate with a
little meditation the true advantages which have resulted from all that for the
happiness of the human species, we cannot fail to be struck by the astonishing
disproportion that reigns in these matters and to deplore the blindness of man,
which, to feed his insane pride and some kind of vain self-admiration, makes
him run passionately after all the miseries to which he is susceptible,
miseries that beneficent nature had taken care to keep from him.

Men are bad. Sad and continual
experience removes the need for proof. However, man is naturally good. I
believe I have demonstrated that. So what is it that could have corrupted him
to this point, if not the changes which have arisen in his constitution, the
progress he has made, and the knowledge he has acquired? Let us admire human
society as much as we wish; it will be no less true that it necessarily leads
men to hate each other to the extent their interests clash, to carry out
apparently mutual services and, in fact, to do to each other all the bad things
imaginable. What can we think of dealings where every individual’s reason
dictates to him maxims directly contrary to those which public reason preaches
to the social body, and where each man profits from the misfortunes of others?
There is perhaps not a single well-off man whose death his greedy heirs and
often his own children do not secretly hope for, not a single ship at sea whose
wreck would not be good news for some merchant, not a single business that a
dishonest debtor would not desire to see burn down along with all the papers it
contains, not a single people which does not rejoice at the disasters of its
neighbors. In this way do we benefit from the harm done to our fellow men, and
one person’s loss almost always makes someone else prosperous. But what is
still more dangerous is that a great many individuals expect and hope for
public disasters. Some want sicknesses, others death, others war, others
famine. I have seen despicable men weeping with grief at the prospect of a year
with bountiful harvests, and the great and fatal fire of London, which cost the
lives or the goods of so many unfortunate people, perhaps made a fortune for
more than ten thousand individuals. I know that Montaigne criticizes the
Athenian Demades for having had a worker punished who, by selling coffins for a
very high price, earned a great deal from the deaths of citizens. But since the
reason Montaigne offers is that it would be necessary to punish everyone, his
argument clearly confirms my own. Let us therefore look through our frivolous
demonstrations of benevolence to what happens in the depths of our hearts, and
let us reflect on what the condition of things must be where all men are forced
to caress and to destroy each other, and where they are born enemies by duty
and frauds by interest. If, in response, people tell me that society is so
constituted that each man gains by serving others, I will reply that that would
be all very well if he did not gain even more by injuring them. There is no
legitimate profit which is not exceeded by what one can get illegitimately, and
the wrong done to one’s neighbour is always more lucrative than doing him favours.
So it is merely a matter of finding ways to make sure of one’s impunity, and
for that the powerful use all their strength and the weak all their cunning.

When savage man has eaten, he is at
peace with all nature and the friend of all his fellows. What if there is
sometimes a quarrel over a meal? He never comes to blows over it without having
previously compared the difficulty of prevailing with that of finding his
subsistence elsewhere, and since his pride is not involved in the fight, it
ends with a few punches. The winner eats, the loser goes to seek his fortune,
and everything is peaceful. But with man in society, such quarrels are very
different matters. It is primarily a matter of providing what is necessary and
then what is superfluous; then come the delicacies, then immense riches, then
subjects, then slaves. He does not have a moment’s rest. What is most
remarkable is that the less natural and urgent his needs, the more his passions
increase, and, what is worse, so does the power to satisfy them. As a result,
after long periods of prosperity, after gobbling up many treasures and ruining
many men, my hero will end up slitting every throat until he is the sole master
of the universe. Such, in summary, is the moral picture, if not of human life,
at least of the secret pretensions in the heart of every civilized man.

Compare without prejudice the state of
civil man with that of savage man, and, setting aside civil man’s malice, his
needs, and his miseries, investigate, if you can, how many new doors he has
opened to pain and death. If you consider the mental afflictions which consume
us, the violent passions which exhaust and depress us, the excessive toil with
which the poor are overburdened, the even more dangerous soft life to which the
rich abandon themselves, things which make the former die from their needs and
the latter from their excesses; if you think of the grotesque mixtures of
foods, their pernicious seasonings, the corrupt provisions, the counterfeit
drugs, the skullduggery of those who sell them, the mistakes of those who
administer them, the poisoned containers in which they are prepared; if you
consider the epidemic illnesses produced by the bad air among the hordes of
people crowded together and the sicknesses brought about by the delicacy of our
way of life, the moving back and forth from the interior of our houses into the
open air, the use of clothing put on or removed with too little precaution, and
all the cares which our excessive sensuality has turned into essential habits,
whose neglect or lack then costs us our life or health; if you take into
account the fires and earthquakes that engulf or overturn entire cities and
kill off their inhabitants by the thousands—in short, if you add up the dangers
which all these causes are continually gathering above our heads, you will
sense how dearly nature makes us pay for the contempt we have shown for her
lessons.

I will not repeat here what I have said
elsewhere about war, but I wish that informed people wanted or dared for once
to provide the public with details of the horrors committed in armies by
contractors for provisions and for hospitals. We would see that their tactics,
which are not very secret and thanks to which the most brilliant armies melt
away into less than nothing, cause more soldiers to die than are cut down by
enemy swords. It is no less astonishing to calculate the number of men the sea
swallows every year, whether by hunger, or scurvy, or pirates, or fire, or
shipwreck. It is clear that we must also credit established property, and
therefore society, with the assassinations, poisonings, highway robberies, and
even the punishments for these crimes. These punishments are necessary to
prevent greater evils, but for the murder of one man, they cost the lives of
two or more and thus, in effect, double the loss for the human species. How
many shameful ways are there to prevent the birth of human beings and to cheat
nature? It can be done by those brutal and depraved tastes that insult its most
charming work, tastes which neither savages nor animals ever know and which
emerge in civilized countries only from a corrupt imagination; or by those
secret abortions,worthy fruits of
debauchery and vicious honor, or by the exposure or slaughter of a multitude of
children, victims of their parents’ poverty or their mothers’ barbarous shame;
or, finally, by the mutilation of those unfortunate men for whom a part of
their existence and all of their posterity are sacrificed to vain songs or,
worse still, to the brutal jealousy of a few men, a mutilation which in this
latter case is a double outrage to nature, both for the
treatment received by those who suffer it and for the use to which they are
destined.(35)

[But are there not a thousand more
frequent and even more dangerous cases where paternal rights overtly offend
humanity? How many talents are buried and inclinations forced by fathers’
imprudent constraints! How many men who would have distinguished themselves in
an appropriate social position die miserable and dishonored in another position
for which they had no taste! How many happy but unequal marriages have been
broken or upset, and how many chaste wives disgraced by these conditions of the
social order, which permanently contradict the order of nature! How many other
bizarre unions formed by interest and disavowed by love and reason! How many
honest and virtuous married couples torment each other because they are badly
matched! How many young and unhappy victims of their parents’ greed hurl
themselves into vice or spend their wretched days in tears and groan in the
indissoluble bonds which the heart rejects and which have been made by gold
alone! Fortunate sometimes are those women whose courage and even virtue tear
them from life before barbaric violence drives them into crime or despair.
Forgive me, my forever to be pitied father and mother. I regret embittering
your sorrows, but may they serve as an eternal and terrible example to anyone
who ventures, in the name of nature herself, to violate the most sacred of her
rights!

If I have spoken only about those badly
made unions which are the work of our civil society, should we believe that
those where love and sympathy have presided are themselves without their
disadvantages?]

What would it be like if I undertook to
show the human species attacked at its very source and even in the most sacred
of all bonds, where no one any longer dares to listen to nature until after he
has consulted fortune and where, with civil disorder confusing virtues and
vices, continence becomes a criminal precaution and the refusal to give life to
a being like oneself a humanitarian act? But without tearing aside the veil
covering so many horrors, let us be content to indicate the evil for which
others must supply the remedy.

Let us add to all this the number of
unhealthy trades which shorten men’s days or destroy their constitution—such as
working in the mines, the various ways of preparing metals and minerals,above all lead, copper, mercury, cobalt,
arsenic, and realgar, and those other perilous occupations which every day cost
the lives of a number of working men, some of them roofers, others carpenters,
others masons, others quarry workers. Let us add up, I say, all these things, and
we will be able to see in the establishment and perfection of societies the
reasons for the decrease in the species, which more than one philosopher has
observed.

Luxury, impossible to guard against
among men greedy for their own conveniences and for the esteem of others, soon
completes the evil which societies have begun, and under the pretext of keeping
the poor alive, which it should not have been necessary to do, impoverishes all
the rest and sooner or later depopulates the state.

Luxury is a remedy far worse than the
evil it claims to cure, or rather, it is itself the worst of all evils in
whatever state, large or small. In order to feed the hordes of lackeys and
miserable people it has created, luxury overwhelms and ruins the farmer and the
city dweller. It is like those burning winds in the south that cover the grass
and greenery with devouring insects and thus take away the subsistence of
useful animals, and carry famine and death into all the places where they make
themselves felt.

From society and the luxury it produces
are born the liberal and mechanical arts, business, letters, and all those
useless things that make industry flourish, enriching and destroying states.
The reason for this decline is very simple. It is easy to see that by its nature
agriculture must be the least lucrative of all the arts. Since its product is
the most indispensably useful to all men, its price must be proportional to the
resources of the poorest people. From the same principle we can derive this
rule, that in general the arts are profitable in inverse proportion to their
utility, and that the most necessary must finally become the most neglected.
From that we see what we should think of the genuine advantages of industry and
of the real effect its progress brings about.

Such are the perceptible causes of all
the woes into which opulence finally hurls the most admired nations. As
industry and the arts expand and flourish, the scorned farmer, burdened with
taxes essential for maintaining luxury and condemned to spend his life between
work and hunger, abandons his fields to go to the cities to seek the bread he
ought to carry there. The more the stupid eyes of people are struck with
admiration for our capital cities, the more we will have to groan at the sight
of abandoned fields, uncultivated land, and the major roads swamped with
unfortunate citizens who have become beggars or thieves, destined one day to
end their misery on the wheel or a dung heap. This is how the state enriches
itself on the one hand, and grows weak and loses its population on the other,
and how the most powerful monarchies, after a great deal of work to make
themselves opulent and deserted, end up becoming the prey of poor nations that
succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them and then, in their turn, make
themselves wealthy and weak, until they themselves are invaded and destroyed by
others.

For once let someone deign to clarify
for us what could have produced those swarms of barbarians who inundated
Europe, Asia, and Africa for so many centuries. Did they owe this immense
population to the industry of their arts, to the wisdom of their laws, or to
the excellence of their civil society? Let our learned men be so good as to
tell us why, rather than multiplying to this point, these ferocious and brutal
men, without enlightenment, without restraint, without education, did not all
cut each other’s throats at every moment in quarrels over their food or their
hunting? Let them explain to us how these miserable men even had the audacity
to look directly at such clever people as we were, with such excellent military
discipline, such fine codes, and such wise laws. Finally, why, since society
has perfected itself in the countries of the north and people have taken so
much trouble to teach men their mutual duties and the art of living agreeably
and peacefully together, does one no longer see coming from them anything like
these multitudes of men, which it used to produce previously? I am quite afraid
that someone may eventually get the idea of answering me that all these great
things—namely, the arts, sciences, and laws—have been very wisely invented by
men as a beneficial plague to check the excessive multiplication of the
species, for fear that this world, which is intended for us, might finally
become too small for its inhabitants.

What then? Is it
necessary to destroy societies, eliminate yours
and mine, and return to live in the
forests with the bears? A conclusion in the style of my adversaries, one I
prefer to anticipate rather than allow them the shame of drawing. O you, to
whom the heavenly voice has not made itself heard and who do not recognize any
purpose for your species other than to conclude this short life in peace, you
who in the midst of cities can leave behind your fatal acquisitions, your
restless minds, your corrupted hearts, and your frantic desires: since it
depends on you, take back your ancient and first innocence. Go into the woods
to lose the sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and do not
be afraid that you are demeaning your species by renouncing its enlightenment
in order to renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have forever
destroyed our original simplicity, who can no longer nourish themselves on
grass and acorns, nor do without laws and leaders; those who were honored in
their first father with supernatural lessons; those who will see in the
intention of first giving to human actions a morality which they would not have
acquired for a long time the reason for a precept indifferent in itself, and
inexplicable in any other system: those people, in a word, who are convinced
that the divine voice has called all the human race to the enlightenment and
happiness of the celestial intelligences, all these will try, through
exercising the virtues which they oblige themselves to practice as they learn
to understand them, to deserve the eternal reward that they ought to expect
from them. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies of which they
are members; they will love their fellow men and will serve them with all their
power; they will scrupulously obey the laws and the men who are their authors
and ministers; above all, they will honour the good and wise princes who will
know how to prevent, cure, or mitigate this host of abuses and evils always
ready to overwhelm us. They will inspire the zeal of these worthy leaders by
showing them without fear and without flattery the greatness of their task and
the strictness of their duty. But they will no less despise a constitution
which cannot be maintained except with the help of so many respectable people,
more often desired than found, and from which, despite all their cares, are
always born more real calamities than apparent advantages. [Back to Text]

(10) Among the men
we know, either ourselves personally or from historians or travelers, some are
black, others white, others red; some have long hair; others have only woolly
curls; some are almost all hairy; others do not even have a beard. There used
to be, and perhaps still are, nations of men of gigantic height, and, setting
aside the fable of the pygmies, which could well be nothing but an
exaggeration, we know that the Laplanders and especially the people in
Greenland are far below a man’s average height. The claim is even made that
there are entire peoples who have tails like quadrupeds. Without putting blind
faith in the stories of Herodotus and Ctesias, we can at least take from them
this very probable opinion, that if people could have made good observations in
those ancient times, when various peoples followed ways of life more different
from each other than they are today, they would have also
noticed many more striking varieties in the shape of the body and in physical
habits.(36) All these facts, for
which it is easy to provide incontestable proofs, can surprise only those who
are accustomed to looking at nothing but the objects that surround them, and
who are ignorant of the powerful effects of the diversity in climates, weather,
nourishment, ways of life, general habits, and, above all, of the astonishing force
of these very causes when they operate continuously over a long series of
generations. Nowadays, when trade, travels, and conquests increasingly bring
different peoples together and when their ways of life are constantly drawing
closer to one another through frequent communication, we notice that certain
national differences have diminished. For example, everyone can observe that
the French today no longer have those large pale bodies and fair hair described
by Latin historians, although time, along with the mixing of the Franks and
Normans, who were themselves pale and fair-haired, should have re-established
what interaction with the Romans could have taken away from the influence of
the climate upon the natural constitution and complexion of the inhabitants.
All these observations on the varieties which a thousand causes could produce
and have, in fact, produced in the human species make me question whether
several animals similar to men, taken by travelers for beasts without much
examination, either because of some differences they noticed in the external
shape or merely because these animals did not speak, could not have been, in
fact, real savage men, whose race, scattered ages ago in the woods, had no
opportunity to develop any of its potential faculties, had not acquired any
degree of perfection, and remained in the primitive state of nature. Let me
give an example of what I mean:

“In the kingdom of the Congo,” says the
translator of L’Histoire des Voyages,
“we find a number of those large animals people in the East Indies call orangutan, which occupy something like a
middle position between the human species and the baboons. Battel reports that
in the forest of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango, one finds two kinds of
monsters: the larger ones are called pongos
and the others enjokos. The
former resemble man exactly but are much stouter and very tall. They have a
human face and very deep-set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears have no hair,
except for their eyebrows, which are extremely long. Although the rest of their
body is quite hairy, the hair is not particularly thick, and its colour is
brown. Finally, the only part that distinguishes them from men is their leg,
which lacks a calf. They walk upright, with their hands gripping the hair on
each other’s necks. They take refuge in the woods, sleep in trees, and make a
kind of roof up there that keeps them covered from the rain. Their foods are
fruit or wild nuts. They never eat meat. Negroes who move through the forest
habitually light fires there during the night. They notice that in the morning,
once they leave, the pongos take their place around the fire and do not leave
until it is out. For with all their skill, they do not have sufficient sense to
maintain the fire by bringing wood to it.”

“Sometimes they move in groups and kill
the Negroes moving through the forests. They even fall upon elephants that come
to graze in the places where they live and upset them by hitting them so hard
with their fists or with sticks that they force them to run away bellowing.
Pongoes are never taken alive, because they are so strong that ten men would
not be enough to stop them. But the Negroes capture a number of young ones
after killing the mother, to whose body the little one clings tight. When one
of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a pile of branches or
leaves. Purchas adds that in his conversations with Battel he learned from him
personally that a pongo had taken from him a small Negro who
spent an entire month in the company of these animals.(37) For they do no harm to men they come
upon unexpectedly, at least when the men do not look at them, as the small
Negro noticed. Battel did not describe the second species of monster.”

“Dapper confirms that the kingdom of the Congo is full of those animals that in
the Indies are called orangutans, that is, dwellers in the
woods, and which the Africans call quojas-morros.(38)
This beast, he says, is so like man that some travelers have had the idea that
it could be the issue of a woman and a monkey, a chimera that the Negroes
themselves reject. One of these animals was taken from the Congo to Holland and
presented to the Prince of Orange, Frederick Henry. It was as tall as a child
at three years of age and of medium build, but square and well proportioned, extremely
agile, and very lively. Its legs were thick and sturdy, and its entire body was
bare in front but covered with black hair on the back. At first glance, its
face looked like a man’s, but it had a flat, turned-up nose. Its ears were also
those of the human species. Its breasts, for it was a female, were plump, its
navel deep set, its shoulders very well articulated, its hands divided into
fingers and thumbs, and its calves and heels thick and fleshy. It often moved
upright on its legs and was capable of lifting and carrying fairly heavy loads.
When it wanted to drink, it would take the lid of a pot in one hand and hold
the bottom with the other. Afterwards it would gracefully wipe its lips. It lay
down to sleep with its head on a cushion, covering itself with such dexterity
that one would have taken it for a man in bed. The Negroes tell strange stories
about this animal. They claim that it not only takes women and young girls by
force but dares to attack armed men. In short, it seems readily apparent that
it is the satyr of the ancients. Merolla is perhaps talking only about these
animals when he recounts that the Negroes sometimes capture
savage men and women in their hunts.”(39)

There is more in third
volume of the same Histoire des Voyages
about these species of anthropomorphic animalsunder the name beggos
and madrills. But to confine
ourselves to the above accounts, we find in the description of these alleged
monsters some striking similarities to the human species, and smaller
differences than those one could establish between one man and another. We do
not see in these passages the reasons why the authors refuse to give the
animals in question the name savage men,
but it is easy to guess that it is because of their stupidity and also because
they did not speak, weak reasons for those who know that, although the organ
for speech is natural to man, speech itself is not natural to him, and who know
to just what extent his perfectibility could have raised civil man above his
original state. The small number of lines that contain these descriptions
enables us to judge how poorly these animals were observed, and with what
prejudices they have been seen. For example, they are considered monsters, and
yet people agree that they reproduce. In one place Battel says that the pongos
kill the Negroes who cross through the forests; in another Purchas adds that
they do not do them any harm, even when they take them by surprise, at least
not when the Negroes make no attempt to look at them. The pongos gather around
the fires lit by the Negroes when the latter move away, and go off in their
turn when the fire has gone out. There you have the fact. Now here is the
observer’s comment: “For with all their skill, they lack sufficient sense to
maintain the fire by bringing wood to it.”I would like to work out how
Battel or his compiler Purchas could have known that the pongos left the fire
because of their stupidity rather than their will. In a climate like that of
Loango, fire is not something very necessary to animals, and if the Negroes
light them, it is less to fight the cold than to scare off ferocious beasts. It
is thus quite simply the case that, after enjoying the flames for some time or
growing quite warm, the pongos get bored of staying constantly in the same spot
and go away to graze, an activity which demands more time than if they ate
flesh. Moreover, we know that most animals, not excepting man, are naturally
lazy, and that they refuse all sorts of care for themselves which is not
absolutely necessary. Finally, it appears extremely strange that the pongos,
whose dexterity and strength people praise, the pongos who know how to bury
their dead and to make themselves roofs out of branches, do not understand how
to push tinder into the fire. I remember watching a monkey carry out this same
maneuver that these people want to claim the pongos cannot do. It is true that
my ideas were not at that time focused on this subject, and so I myself
committed the mistake for which I am criticizing our travelers: I neglected to
examine if the monkey’s intention was, in fact, to maintain the fire or simply,
as I believe, to imitate the action of a man. Whatever the case, it has been
well demonstrated that the monkey is not a variety of man, not only because it
lacks the capacity to speak, but above all because it is certain that its
species does not have the ability to perfect itself, which is the particular
characteristic of the human species. Experiments do not seem to have been made
on the pongo and the orangutan with sufficient care for us to be able to draw
the same conclusion in their case. Nonetheless, there should be a way by which,
if the orangutan or others were in the human species, even the crudest
observers would be able to assure themselves, even with a demonstration; but apart
from the fact that a single generation would not be sufficient for this
experiment, such a test must be considered impractical, because what is only a
supposition would have to be shown to be true, before the test to confirm the
fact could be innocently attempted.

Judgments that are precipitous and not
the fruit of enlightened reason tend to be excessive. Without any fuss our
travellers made beasts with the names pongos,
mandrills, and orangutans; from the same creatures the ancients made gods using the
names satyrs, fauns, and sylvans.
Perhaps after more precise investigations we will find that they are [neither
beasts nor gods but] men. In the meantime, it seems to me that in this matter
it is every bit as reasonable to rely on Merolla, an educated priest and a
visual witness, who, for all his naïveté, was an intelligent man, as it is to
trust the merchant Battel, Dapper, Purchas, and the other compilers.

What judgment do people think observers
like these would have made on the child found in 1694, whom I have already
spoken about above and who gave no sign of reason, moved on his hands and legs,
had no language, and formed sounds which were nothing like those of a man? It
took a long time, continues the same philosopher who provided me with this fact,
before he was capable of producing a few words, and he still did that in a
barbarous manner. As soon as he could speak, he was questioned about his first
state, but he remembered no more about it than we remember what happened to us
in the cradle. If by some misfortune for him, this child had fallen into the
hands of our travellers, there is no doubt that, after noticing his silence and
stupidity, they would have been in favour of sending him back into the forests
or shutting him up in a menagerie, after which they would have spoken
knowledgeably about him in their splendid reports as a really curious beast
that looked quite similar to man.

During the three or four hundred years
the inhabitants of Europe have been flooding other parts of the world and constantly
publishing new collections of travels and reports, I am convinced that the only
men we know are Europeans. And from the ridiculous prejudices which have not
been extinguished, not even among men of letters,
it still seems that each one, under the grandiose name study of man, does hardly anything but study the men of his own
country. Individuals may come and go but it appears philosophy does not travel.
And so the philosophy of one people is not very suitable for another. The
reason for this is obvious, at least for far-off countries: there are scarcely
more than four kinds of men who undertake lengthy voyages—sailors, merchants,
soldiers, and missionaries. Now, we should hardly expect that the first three
groups would provide good observers, and as far as the members of the fourth
are concerned, they would be busy with the sublime vocation that calls them,
and even if they were not subject to social prejudices, like all the others, we
would have to think they would not willingly devote themselves to investigations
which appear merely curious, and which would divert them from the more
important tasks to which they are destined. Moreover, in order to preach the
gospel effectively, nothing is required except zeal, and God gives the rest.
But to study men requires talents that God does not promise to give to anyone,
and that are not always shared by saints. In every travel book we open we find
descriptions of characters and customs, but we are completely astonished to
notice in them that these people who have described so many things have said
only what everyone knew already, that at the other end of the world they have
grasped only those things they could have observed without leaving their
street, and that the true characteristics which distinguish nations and which
strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. That is the origin
of the fine moral saying, so tossed around by the philosophical crowd, that men
are the same everywhere, and because they have the same passions and the same
vices everywhere, it is rather pointless to seek to characterize different
peoples, a line of reasoning about as good as if one said that we cannot
distinguish Peter and James because both of them have a nose, mouth, and eyes.

Will we never see reborn those happy times
when people did not get mixed up with philosophizing, but when men like Plato,
Thales, and Pythagoras, gripped by a passionate desire to know, undertook the
greatest voyages solely for the purpose of instructing themselves and went far
away to shake off the yoke of national prejudices, to learn to understand men
by their similarities and their differences, and to acquire that universal
knowledge that is not knowledge of one century or of one country exclusively,
but which, being of all times and of all places, is, as it were, the common
science of the wise?

We admire the munificence of some
curious men who have made or made possible at great expense voyages to the
Orient with scholars and painters, so that they could sketch pictures of
crumbling buildings and decipher or copy inscriptions, but I have difficulty
conceiving how, in an age when people pride themselves on their fine
knowledge,one cannot find two closely
linked rich men, one financially rich and the other rich in genius, both with a
love of glory and a desire for immortality, one of whom would sacrifice twenty
thousand crowns of his wealth and the other ten years of his life for a famous
voyage around the world, in order to study, not always rocks and plants, but
for once men and customs, and who, after so many centuries taken up with
measuring and inspecting the house, finally got the idea of wanting to know the
inhabitants.

When academicians have traveled through
the northern parts of Europe and the southern regions of America, their purpose
has been to visit more as geometers than as philosophers. However, since La
Condamine and Maupertuis were both of these at once, we cannot consider the
regions they saw and described as completely unknown. The jeweler Chardin, who
traveled like Plato, has left nothing to say about Persia. China appears to
have been well observed by the Jesuits. Kempfer provides a
passable idea of the little he saw in Japan.(40)
Apart from these accounts, we do not know the people of the East Indies, who
have been visited solely by Europeans more intent on filling their purses than
their heads. All of Africa and its numerous inhabitants, as remarkable for
their character as for their color, remain to be studied. The entire earth is
covered with nations we know nothing about except their names, and yet we make
it our business to judge the human race! Suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a
Diderot, a Duclos, a d’Alembert, a Condillac, or men of that caliber, traveling
to instruct their compatriots, observing and describing, in the way they know
how to do, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the empire of Morocco, Guinea, the lands of
the tribes in southern Africa,the interior and the east coast of Africa, the
Malabars, Mongolia, the banks of the Ganges, the kingdoms of Siam, Pegu and
Ava, China, Tartary, and especially Japan; then in the other hemisphere,
Mexico, Peru, Chile, the lands of Magellan, not forgetting the Patagonias, true
or false, Tucamen, if possible Paraguay, Brazil, finally the Caribbean,
Florida, and all the savage countries, the most important voyage of all and one
which would have to be undertaken with the greatest care. Suppose that these
new Herculeses returned from these memorable journeys, then at their leisure
created a natural history, moral and political, of what they had seen. We would
ourselves see a new world emerge from under their pens, and from this we would
learn to understand our own. I say that when observers like these affirm that
such and such an animal is a man and that another is a beast, we will have to believe
them. But it would be extremely simplistic in this matter to rely on inaccurate
travelers, about whom one is tempted sometimes to pose the same question they
take it upon themselves to resolve concerning other animals. [Back to Text]

(11) This appears
to me to be absolutely obvious, and I cannot understand where our philosophers
can find the source for all the passions they ascribe to natural man. With the
sole exception of physical necessity, which nature herself demands, all our
other needs are only those that arise from habit, before which they were not
needs, or from our desires, and one does not desire what one is in no condition
to know. From this it follows that since savage man desires only things that he
knows and knows only things that are within his power to possess, or that are
easy to acquire, nothing must be so tranquil as his soul and nothing so limited
as his mind. [Back
to Text]

(12)
In Locke’s Civil Government I find an
objection that appears to me too specious for me to be permitted to conceal it.

“The purpose of social interaction
between the male and female,” says this philosopher, “is not simply to
procreate but to continue the species, and so this interaction must last, even
after procreation, at least as long as is necessary for the nourishment and the
preservation of the offspring, that is to say, until they are capable of
supplying their needs themselves. We see that creatures inferior to man
constantly and strictly observe this rule, which the infinite wisdom of the
Creator has established for the works of His hands. In those animals which live
on grass, the interaction between the male and female lasts only as long as
each act of copulation, because the mother’s teats are sufficient to nourish
the young until such time as they are capable of grazing on grass; thus, the
male is content with begetting and does not involve himself after that with the
female or with the young, to whose subsistence he can contribute nothing. But
where beasts of prey are concerned, the interaction lasts longer, because the
mother is unable to provide properly for her own subsistence and to nourish her
young at the same time by means of her prey alone, for this way of feeding
oneself is more laborious and more dangerous than feeding on grass. The
assistance of the male is absolutely essential for the maintenance of their
common family, if one may use this term, which cannot survive to the point
where the young are able to go in search of prey except through the care of the
male and female. One observes the same thing among all the birds, with the
exception of some domestic ones that are found in places where the continual
abundance of food exempts the male from the care of feeding the young. One sees
that while the young in their nest require nourishment, the male and the female
bring it there, until these young can fly and provide their own subsistence.

“And in that, I believe, consists the
principal, if not the only, reason why the male and the female of humankind are
obliged to a longer social interaction than the one that other creatures
maintain. This reason is that the woman is capable of conceiving and is
typically pregnant once again and producing a new child long before the earlier
one is at the stage where it can do without the help of its parents and provide
for its needs itself. In this way, a father is obliged to take care of those
whom he has engendered and to continue that care for a long time: he also has
an obligation to continue living in a conjugal association with the same woman
with whom he had them and to remain in this relationship much longer than other
creatures, among whom, because the young can survive on their own before the
time for a new procreation arrives, the bond between male and female is broken
on its own, and both find themselves completely free, until the season which
customarily prompts animals to pair off requires them to choose new mates. And
here we cannot admire enough the wisdom of the Creator, who, having given man
the qualities appropriate to providing for the future as well as for the present,
wanted and saw to it that the social interaction of man and woman would last
much longer than that of the male and the female among other creatures, so that
in this way the industry of the man and woman would be more stimulated and
their interests more unified, with a view to providing for their children and
leaving them their goods, since nothing could be more prejudicial to children than an uncertain and vague union, or an easy and
frequent dissolution, of conjugal society.”(41)

The same love of truth that has made me
sincerely set down this objection prompts me to accompany it with some remarks,
if not to refute it, at least to illuminate it.

1. I will first observe that moral
proofs do not have much force in matters of physical science, and that they
serve to provide reasons for existing facts rather than to establish the actual
existence of these facts. Now, that is the kind of proof that Mr. Locke uses in
the passage I have just cited. For although it could be advantageous for the
human species that the union of the man and the woman be permanent, it does not
follow that things have been established this way by nature; otherwise we would
have to say that nature also instituted civil society, arts, commerce, and
everything claimed to be useful to men.

2. I do not know where Mr. Locke
discovered that among animals of prey, the interaction between the male and
female lasts longer than among animals living on grass, and that one helps the
other feed the young. For we do not see the male dog, cat, bear, or wolf
acknowledging their female any more than the horse, ram, bull, stag, or all the
other quadrupeds acknowledge theirs. On the contrary, it seems that, if the
male’s assistance was necessary to the female in order to preserve the young,
this would be above all in the species which lived only on grass, because the
mother requires a great deal of time to graze, and during this whole period she
is forced to neglect her litter; whereas, the prey of a female bear or wolf is
devoured in an instant, and so she has more time to suckle her young without
suffering from hunger. This reasoning is confirmed by an observation on the
relative number of teats and young that distinguishes carnivorous from
frugivorous species, a point I discussed in Note 8. If this observation is
accurate and general, since the woman has only two teats and rarely has more
than one child at a time, there is a powerful additional reason for doubting
that the human species is naturally carnivorous. Hence, it seems that, in order
to draw Locke’s conclusion, we would have to turn his reasoning completely
around. The same distinction applied to birds is no more reliable. For who will
be persuaded that the union of male and female lasts longer among vultures and
crows than among turtledoves? We have two species of domestic birds, the duck
and the pigeon, that provide us with examples directly contrary to this
author’s system. The pigeon, which lives on nothing but grain, remains united
with his female, and they feed their young together. The duck, whose voracity
is well-known, does not recognize either his female or his young and does not
help at all with their subsistence. Among chickens, a species hardly less
carnivorous, we do not observe the rooster making any effort at all for the
brood. And if in other species the male shares with the female the care of
feeding the young, that is because birds, which cannot fly at first and which
the mother cannot suckle, are far less able to do without the help of the
father than are quadrupeds, for whom the mother’s teat is sufficient, at least
for a while.

3. There is considerable uncertainty
about the main fact that serves as the basis for Mr. Locke’s entire argument.
For, in order to know if, as he claims, in a pure state of nature the woman is
typically pregnant once again and producing a new child long before the
previous one can provide for its needs by itself, we would require experiments
that Locke certainly did not do and that no one is in a position to do. The
continued cohabitation of husband and wife provides such an immediate
opportunity for them to experience a new pregnancy that it is very difficult to
believe that fortuitous meetings or the mere impulse of temperament produced
these results as frequently in the pure state of nature as in conjugal society,
a slow pace which would perhaps contribute to making the children more robust
and which, in addition, could be compensated for by an ability to conceive
prolonged to an older age among women who would have abused it less during
their youth. As far as children are concerned, there are a number of reasons
for believing that their strength and their organs develop later among us than
they did in the primitive condition I am talking about. The original weakness
which they get from the constitution of their parents, the cares which are
taken to wrap and constrain all their limbs, the tenderness with which they are
raised, perhaps the use of milk other than their mother’s—all these work
against and delay in them the first progress of nature. The care they are
required to give to a thousand things on which their attention is constantly
fixed, without being given any exercise for their bodily strength, could again
considerably hamper their growth, so that, if, instead of at first overloading
and exhausting their minds in a thousand ways, we let them exercise their
bodies with the continual movements which nature appears to demand of them, we
can believe they would be capable of walking, being active, and providing for
their own needs themselves much earlier.

4.
Finally, Mr. Locke proves at most that there could well be in man a motive to
remain attached to a woman when she has a child. But he in no way proves that
he must have been attached to her before the delivery and during the nine
months of the pregnancy. If a given woman is indifferent to the man during
these nine months, if she has even become unknown to him, why will he assist
her after the birth? Why will he help her raise a child which he does not even
know belongs to him, and whose birth he did not decide upon or anticipate? Mr.
Locke is evidently assuming what is in question. For it is not a matter of
knowing why the man will remain attached to the woman after the birth, but why
he will attach himself to her after conception. The appetite satisfied, the man
has no more need for that particular woman, nor the woman for that particular
man. He has not the least concern for and perhaps the least idea about the
consequences of his action. One goes off in one direction, the other in
another, and it is not clear that at the end of nine months they retain the
memory of having known each other. For this sort of memory by which one
individual gives preference to another for the act of procreation demands, as I
demonstrate in the text, more progress or corruption in the human understanding
than one can assume it has in the condition of animality in question. Thus,
another woman can satisfy the man’s new desires just as easily as the one whom
he has already known, and another man can satisfy the woman in the same way,
assuming that she is motivated by the same desire during pregnancy, something
we can reasonably doubt. If in the state of nature the woman no longer feels
the passion of love after the conception of the child, the obstacles facing
interaction with the man become much greater still, since she then has no
further need either of the man who has impregnated her or of any other. There
is thus in the man no reason to seek out the same woman, nor in the woman any
reason to seek out the same man. Hence, Locke’s reasoning collapses in ruins,
and this philosopher’s whole dialectic has not saved him from the mistake that
Hobbes and others have committed. They had to explain a fact about the state of
nature, that is, a state where men lived by themselves and where two particular
men had no motive for living near one another, nor perhaps, even worse, did men
have to live near other men. They did not think of taking themselves back
before the centuries of society, in other words, before those times when men
always have a reason to live close together, and where a given man often has
reason to live near a particular man or woman [Back to Text]

(13) I will take
good care not to embark on the philosophical reflections one would need to make
concerning the advantages and disadvantages of this institution of languages.
It is not for me to be allowed to attack vulgar errors, and well-read people
respect their prejudices too much to endure patiently my alleged paradoxes. So
let us allow those people to speak for whom it has not been made a crime to
sometimes dare to take the side of reason against the opinion of the multitude.
And nothing of the happiness of the human
race would go away, if, when the trouble and confusion of so many languages
have been dispensed with, mortals understood one art, and it would be permitted
to explain anything by signs, motions, and gestures. But now, given the way
things are, the condition of animals popularly believed to be brutes seems far
better than ours in this respect, since they signify their feeling and thoughts
without an interpreter more readily and perhaps more aptly than any mortals can, particularly if they use a foreign language. Isaac
Vossius, de Poëmatum Cantu & Viribis
Rythmi, p. 66.(42)[Back to Text]

(14) Plato, in
demonstrating how much ideas of discrete quantity and its relationships are
necessary in the least of the arts, mocks with reason the authors of his time
who claimed that Palamedes had invented numbers at the siege of Troy, as if,
says this philosopher, Agamemnon could not have known up to then how many legs
he had. In fact, we know that it would have been impossible for society and the
arts to have reached the stage they had already attained at the time of the
siege of Troy had men not had the use of numbers and calculation. But the need
to understand numbers before acquiring other knowledge does not make their
invention easier to imagine. Once the names of the numbers are known, we can
easily explain what they mean and bring out the ideas these names represent;
but to invent them, one must, before conceiving these same ideas, be, as it
were, familiar with philosophical meditations, trained in thinking about beings
according to their essence alone, independently of all other perception, a very
difficult and very metaphysical abstraction, scarcely natural, and yet without
which these ideas could never have been carried from one species or genus to
another, nor could numbers have become universal. A savage could have
considered his right leg and his left leg separately, or looked at them
together under the indivisible idea of a pair, without ever thinking he had two
of them. For the representative idea that pictures an object for us is one
thing, and the numerical idea that determines it is another. Even less could he
have counted up to five, and although, by placing his hands against each other,
he would have been able to notice that the fingers corresponded exactly, he was
still very far from thinking about their numerical equality. He did not know
the number of his digits any more than number of his hairs, and if, once he was
made to understand what numbers were, someone had told him that he had as many
digits on his feet as on his hands, perhaps he would have been quite surprised,
when he compared them, to discover that this was true. [Back to Text]

(15) One must not
confuse amour propre with amour de soi-même, two very different passions in their natures and in their
effects. Amour de soi-même is a
natural feeling that inclines every animal to see to its own preservation and
which, guided in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and
virtue. Amour propre is only a
relative feeling, factitious and born in society, which inclines each
individual to be preoccupied with himself more than with anyone else, which
inspires in men all the evils they do to each other, and which is the real
source of honour.

Once this is well understood, I say
that in our primitive condition, in the true state of nature, amour propre does not exist. For since
each individual man looks at himself as the only spectator who observes him, as
the only being in the universe who takes an interest in him, and as the only
judge of his own merit, it is impossible that a sentiment that originates from
comparisons, which he has no inclination to make, could spring up in his soul.
For the same reason, this man could have neither hatred nor desire for
vengeance, passions that can arise only from the feeling of some offense he has
received. And since it is scorn or the intention to harm and not the evil
itself that constitutes the offense, men who do not know either how to assess
or to compare themselves can commit a great deal of violence against each other
when there is some advantage to them in doing so, without ever offending each
other. In a word, since each man hardly looks at his fellow men except in the
way he would look at animals of a different species, he can carry off the prey
of the weaker man or yield his to the stronger, without seeing these acts of
plunder as anything other than natural events, without the least impulse of insolence
or bitterness and without any passion other than the pain or joy at a good or a
bad outcome. [Back
to Text]

(16) It is
extremely remarkable that in all those years that Europeans have been eager to
bring savages from various regions of the world into their way of life, they
have still not been able to win over a single one of them, not even with the
support of Christianity. For our missionaries have sometimes made them
Christians, but never civilized men. Nothing can overcome the invincible
repugnance they have against adopting our customs and living in our manner. If
these poor savages are as wretched as people claim, by what inconceivable lack
of judgment do they constantly refuse to civilize themselves by imitating us,
or to learn how to live happily among us? By contrast, we read in a thousand
places that Frenchmen and other Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge among
these nations and spent their entire lives there, without being able to leave
such a strange way of life. We even see sensible missionaries touchingly
missing the calm and innocent days they spent among those despised peoples. If
someone responds that these savages do not have enough enlightenment to judge
soundly of their condition and ours, I will answer that evaluating happiness is
less a matter of reason than of sentiment. Furthermore, this response could be
turned against us with still more force. For there is a greater distance
between our ideas and the mental disposition we would need to understand the
taste which the savages have for their way of life, than between the savages’
ideas and those which could make them understand the way we live. In fact,
after a few observations it is easy for them to see that all our labours are
directed at only two objectives; namely, at conveniences of life for ourselves
and at respect from other people. But how are we to imagine the sort of
pleasure a savage takes at spending his life alone in the middle of the woods,
or fishing, or blowing on a badly-made flute, without ever knowing how to draw
from it a single note and without taking the trouble to learn?

On several occasions people have
brought savages to Paris, London, and other cities. They have been quick to
display for them our luxuries, our riches, and all our most useful and most
intriguing arts. All this has never aroused in them anything but a stupid
admiration, without the least turn to covetousness. Among others stories, I
remember one about some North American chief who was brought to the English
court some thirty years ago. They had a thousand articles paraded before his
eyes in an attempt to find something that would please him as a gift, without
discovering anything he appeared to care about. Our weapons seemed heavy and
awkward to him, our shoes hurt his feet, and our clothes bothered him. He refused
everything. Finally, they noticed that he took up a woolen blanket and seemed
to get pleasure from wrapping it around his shoulders. “You will at least
concede,” someone said to him immediately, “the usefulness of this item?”
“Yes,” he replied, “it seems to me almost as good as an animal skin.” And he
would not have said even that if he had worn them both in the rain.

Perhaps I will be told that it is habit
that, by attaching each person to his manner of life, prevents savages from
sensing what is good in ours. If so, it must appear at least really
extraordinary that habit has more power to maintain in savages a taste for
their misery than in Europeans an enjoyment of their happiness. But to frame a
response to this last objection to which one cannot offer a single word in
reply, and without referring to all the young savages whom people have
struggled in vain to civilize, without mentioning the Greenlanders and the
inhabitants of Iceland whom they tried to raise and feed in Denmark, all of
whom were killed off by sadness and despair, whether from listlessness or in
the sea—where they attempted to swim back to their country—I will content
myself with citing a single well-attested example, which I offer to admirers of
European civilization for their consideration.

“All the efforts of the Dutch
missionaries of the Cape of Good Hope have never been able to convert a single
Hottentot. Van der Stel, governor of the Cape, took one of them in infancy and
had him raised in the principles of the Christian religion and the practice of
European habits. He was richly dressed, they had him learn several languages,
and his progress responded extremely well to the cares people took with his
education. The governor, who had high hopes for his mind, sent him to the Indies
with a commissioner general, who employed him usefully in the affairs of the
company. He came back to the Cape after the commissioner’s death. A few days
after his return, while visiting some Hottentots in his family, he took it upon
himself to strip off his European finery in order to clothe himself with a
sheepskin. He returned to the fort in this new outfit, carrying a package
containing his old clothes and, as he presented them to the governor, said the
following to him: “Have the goodness, sir, to pay attention to the fact that I
am renouncing these clothes forever. I also renounce for all my life the
Christian religion. My resolution is to live and die in the religion, manners,
and customs of my ancestors. The only favor I ask of you is to leave me the
necklace and cutlass I am wearing. I will keep them for love of you.”Without waiting for Van der Stel’s
response, he immediately ran off in flight and they never saw
him again at the Cape.” Histoire des
Voyages, Vol. 5, p. 175.(43) [Back to Text]

(17) One could object against me that
in such a disorder, instead of stubbornly butchering each other, men would have
scattered, if there were no limits to their dispersion. But, first of all,
these boundaries would have to have been at least the limits of the world, and
if we think about the excessive population that results from the state of
nature, we will see that the earth in this condition would not have taken long
to become covered with men thereby compelled to remain together. Moreover, they
would have dispersed if the evil had been quick and the change something which
happened from one day to the next. But they were born under the yoke. They were
habituated to bearing it when they felt its weight, and they were content to
wait for the opportunity to shake it off. Finally, already accustomed to the
thousands of conveniences which forced them to remain together, scattering was
no longer as easy as in the first days, when no one had a need for anything
except himself, and each of them decided what to do without waiting for
another’s consent. [Back
to Text]

(18) Marshal de
V*** used to tell the story that in one of his campaigns, when the excessive
corrupt dealing of one of the contractors for provisions made the army suffer
and grumble, he scolded him sharply and threatened to have him hanged. “This
threat does not concern me,” the scoundrel brazenly answered him, “and I am
very pleased to tell you that they don’t hang a man who has at his disposal a
hundred thousand crowns.” “I don’t know how that came about,” the marshal added
naively, “but in fact he was not hanged, although he deserved it a hundred
times over.” [Back to Text]

(19) Distributive
justice would still be against this strict equality in the state of nature,
even if it were practicable in civil society. And since all the members of the
state owe it their services in proportion to their talents and their strengths,
the citizens, in their turn, should be distinguished and favored in proportion
to their services. It is in this sense that we must understand a passage of
Isocrates, where he praises the first Athenians for having well understood how
to distinguish the more advantageous of the two sorts of equality: one which
consists of dividing the same advantages indifferently among all the citizens,
and the other of distributing them according to individual merit. These
skillful politicians, the orator adds, banned that unjust equality which
establishes no difference between good and bad men, and cleaved themselves
inviolably to the one that rewards and punishes each according to his merit. But,
first of all, there has never existed a society, no matter what degree of
corruption it might have reached, in which people make no distinction between
good and bad men. And in the matter of morals, where the law cannot establish a
measurement sufficiently precise to serve as a rule for the magistrate, it very
wisely—in order not to leave the fate or the rank of the citizens to the
discretion of the magistrate—forbids him from judging persons and allows him to
judge nothing but actions. There are no morals so pure that they can endure
censors, other than those of the ancient Romans, and similar tribunals would
soon have upset everything among us. It is up to public esteem to establish the difference between bad and good
people; the magistrate judges only matters of explicit law. But the people are
the true judge of morality, a judge of integrity and even enlightenment in this
matter, one who is sometimes misled but never corrupted. The ranks of the
citizens thus ought to be regulated, not on the basis of their personal merit,
which would allow the magistrate a way of making an almost arbitrary
application of the law, but on the basis of the real services they render the
state, which are amenable to a more exact assessment. [Back to Text]

(2)
The “Lords” Rousseau is addressing repeatedly in this first part may be the
leading members in the city council or the citizens of Geneva collectively. [Back to Text]

(3)
In Rome’s very early history the citizens were ruled by an Etruscan clan called
the Tarquins. [Back to
Text]

(4) Tacituswas a Roman historian,Plutarcha very famous Greek biographer
(of great men), andGrotius(1583-1645) an influential Dutch
writer on law. Rousseau’s father, a watchmaker, was an educated man. [Back to Text]

(5) The phrase
“unfortunate events,” like the earlier “fatal misunderstanding” Rousseau talks
about, refers to an ongoing conflict between the leading magistrates and the
legislative body in Geneva at various times throughout the eighteenth century.
These had been apparently resolved by the time Rousseau was writing, but
disputes flared up again in the 1760’s and 1780’s. [Back to Text]

(9) Xenocrates(396-314 BC) was Greek philosopher. He
became head of Plato’s Academy. [Back to Text]

(10) Thomas
Hobbes (1688-1679) was an English philosopher, famous for his political theory
and his bleak view of the state of nature. Richard Cumberland (1631-1718), an
English bishop and philosopher, wrote against Hobbes’ theories and proposed a
utilitarian doctrine; Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1674), a German baron and historian,
was well-known for his writings on international law. [Back to Text]

(11) Francisco
Coreal (1648-1708) was a Spanish traveler who visited North and South America
and wrote about his journeys. [Back to Text]

(12) In Homer’sIliad,PodaliriusandMachaonare the healers in the Argive army
fighting against Troy; Aulus Cornelius Celsus (fl. 14 AD), a Roman, wrote books
on medicine; Hippocrates (460-370 BC) was a famous Greek healer, the father of
medicine. [Back
to Text]

(13) Johannes de
Laet was a Dutch writer who published a book on his travels in the Americas in
1625. [Back to Text]

(14) Eurotaswas the river associated with Sparta,
a much more fertile territory than Attica, the area around Athens. [Back to Text]

(15)Etienne
Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1788) was a French philosopher and cleric who wrote
about the origins of human knowledge in sense perception. [Back to Text]

(16) Rousseau quotes the Latin:tanto
plus in illis proficit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis—a
comment by the historian Justin comparing barbarians favourably to the Greeks. [Back to Text]

(17) The Fable of the Beesis a famous satiric poem written in 1705
by the Dutch-Englishman Bernard Mandeville. It explores the connections between
vice and social progress. Mandeville is the person Rousseau is referring to
earlier in the paragraph when he uses the phrase “the most extravagant
detractor of human virtues.”[Back to Text]

(18)Sulla (138
BC to 78 BC) was a Roman politician who seized control of Rome and persecuted
his enemies. Alexander of Pherae(d.
358 BC) was a tyrant in Thessaly, finally killed by members of his family. Priam
and Andromache, of the Trojan royal family, were frequently portrayed in tragic
drama. Rousseau then quotes the Latin from the satirist Juvenal: Mollissima
corda/ Humano generi dare se natura fatetur/ Quae lacrimas dedit. [Back to Text]

(19)John Locke
(1632-1704) was an enormously influential and important English philosopher.
Rousseau quotes Locke from the French translation and substitutesinjuryfor the wordinjustice. [Back to Text]

(20)Hugo Grotius
(1583-1645) was a very famous Dutch jurist whose writings are considered the
first definitive treatment in modern times of international law.Ceresis the Latin name for the Greek
deity Demeter, goddess of the harvest. The Greek wordthesmophorosmeans law-giving. [Back to Text]

(21) Rousseau’s Latin
quotation reads:Attonitus
novitate mali, divesque miserque,/ Effugere optat opes, et quoe modo voverat,
odit.” Ovid, MetamorphosesXI.
Ovid is describing Midas who had been given by Apollo the power of turning all
things he touched into gold. [Back to
Text]

(22) Lycurguswas the legendary founder of the
Spartan constitution (probably in the 7th century BC), a political arrangement
that lasted for about two hundred years. [Back to Text]

(23) Pliny the Younger
(62-113 AD) was well known Roman politician and Trajan was Roman emperor
(53-117 AD).[Back to Text]

(24) Brasidaswas an important Spartan general in the
5th century BC. A satrap was a Persian official, Persepolis an important city
in the Persian empire. [Back to Text]

(29)Rousseau
quotes the Latincui ex
honesto nulla est spes,a
reworking of a line from the Roman historian Tacitus. [Back to Text]

(30)Diogenes, a
Greek Cynic philosopher (c. 412– 323 BC), is reported to have spent his life
looking for an honest man.Cato
the Younger (95-46 BC) was an important Roman political figure, a staunch
defender of the Republic. [Back to
Text]

(31)Ataraxiais a Greek word meaning tranquillity. For the Stoics the word
meant absence of passion, a highly desirable state.[Back to Text]

(32)A work by
the celebrated French natural scientist Buffon, 1752. [Back to Text]

(33) Peter
Kolben was a German astronomer who worked in the Cape of Good Hope from 1705 to
1713 and published a book in German in 1719 about the Hottentots. The book was
translated into English in 1731. [Back to Text]

(34) Pere du
Tertre, a French priest, wrote a history of the Antilles in 1667 based on his
experiences there. [Back to Text]

(35) The
“mutilation” Rousseau refers to is castration, used to produce male soprano
singers and eunuchs for harems. [Back to Text]

(36)
Herodotus and Ctesiaswere
ancient Greek historians in the fifth century BC.[Back to Text]

(37) Battelwas an English sailor who spent
time in West Africa c. 1590;Samuel
Purchasspublished an account of
West Africa in 1613. [Back to Text]

(38) Dapperwas a Dutch explorer in Africa
in the 1640’s.Father Jerom
Merollapublished his
account of a voyage to West Africa c. 1682. [Back to Text]

(39)Jerome Merolla (c. 1650–c. 1710) was a missionary
who wrote about his experiences in the Congo. [Back to Text]

(40)La Condamine(1701-1774) was a French mathematician
who traveled in Peru and was the first to write extensively about the Amazon
River; Maupertuis (1698-1759) was a famous French mathematician who traveled in
Peru;Jean Chardinor Sir John Chardin (1643-1714) was a
French merchant who traveled extensively in Persia in 1673;Englebert Kempfer(1651-1716) was a German who went with
Dutch traders to Japan in the late 1600’s. All of these wrote about their
travels.[Back to Text]

(41) Rousseau quotes from the
French translation of Locke, and the above passage is a translation of that
text, rather than a direct quotation from Locke. [Back to Text]

Ian Johnston is an
Emeritus Professor at Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia.
He is the author of The
Ironies of War: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad and of Essays and Arguments: A Handbook for
Writing Student Essays. He also translated a number of works,
including the following:

Most of these
translations have been published as books or audiobooks (or both)—by Richer
Resources Publications, Broadview Press, Naxos, Audible, and others.

Ian Johnston maintains a
web site where texts of these translations are freely available to students,
teachers, artists, and the general public. The site includes a number of Ian
Johnston’s lectures on these (and other) works, handbooks, curricular
materials, and essays, all freely available.